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What's happening to reading?
- Kaibeezy 1y agohttps://archive.ph/95Zyw https://archive.ph/95Zyw
- PaulHoule 1y agoSix months ago there seemed to be a flood of people who wanted to normalize Dyslexia and were pitching startups that the 75% of people who can read just didn't need because... they can read. Haven't seen so many pitches for summarizers lately.
- genewitch 1y agothere was software called Copernic Summarizer ~25 years ago that was so useful for taking huge articles and condensing them into a paragraph. I have no idea how it worked. At some point i lost access to several pieces of software i bought in that era, also including ambrosia software's catalog which i had purchased. I think i lost my gte email address or something, can hardly remember. I haven't used chatgpt (or whatever) for summaries in a couple of years, so i have no idea what SOTA is; although "chat with a document" seems like it'd be more useful in general than a summary for the way i eschew long-form articles.
- PaulHoule 1y agoFor me chat with a paragraph in a language I sorta know (Japanese) or wish I knew (Chinese) is really useful. I ask for a translation and see discordances with what I can read and ask about them and get good answers. I also can lean on translations from my text and insist that certain words get used, etc.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoThey also had Copernic desktop search which was really good until they enshittified it slowly.
- genewitch 1y agothankfully "everything.exe" is everything i need. not affiliated, it's just really nice on windows. On linux, mlocate and the like are fine, although i find myself doing a `find / -name foo` most often. I don't use Mac, but i have an understanding that spotlight/sherlock or whatever isn't as good as it was in the past. Someday i'll actually put all my documents into a document database so i can search stuff inside the documents. Did Copernic desktop search do that? Windows ~98 could; it was real slow back then. I have so many "documents" that even if windows still allows searching within files (it probably does) i reckon it'd kill my hard drives eventually.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoYes. Copernic desktop search indexed document content. And it was quick. It's pretty hard to understand that MS still can't do useful search
- kqr 1y ago> I have no idea how it worked. I traced down this through an academic article which favourably compared it to other summarising solutions back in 2006. It might help answer the question: https://web.archive.org/web/20070209101837/http://www.copernic.com/data/pdf/summarization-whitepaper-eng.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20070209101837/http://www.copern...
- xphilter 1y agoI can’t read it (lol) due to paywall, but 100% it’s because we stopped teaching kids how to read. But good luck trying to hold public schools accountable! https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/podcasts/the-daily/reading-school-phonics.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/podcasts/the-daily/readin...
- niux 1y agoJust install Bypass Paywalls Clean extension. This is the author: https://x.com/Magnolia1234B https://x.com/Magnolia1234B
- nottorp 1y agoThe article is about "AI" not people stopping reading even before "AI". Someone trying to jump on the bandwagon...
- easterncalculus 1y agoSorry but if we can't correlate learning to read with literacy we're not allowed to correlate anything at all. Comprehension is massive and the difference between college and 6th great reading comprehension is an ocean that influences whether people pick anything up or pass it to ChatGPT.
- hluska 1y agoSorry but that’s still not relevant. The article takes a totally different view on what’s happening. Other sides could be valid too but they’re not part of the article.
- bee_rider 1y agoOh dang, we were all worried about time traveling AI, right?
- xphilter 1y agoRight. But you don’t think the giant education gap right before AI isn’t the primary reason?
- micromacrofoot 1y agoI don't know, maybe putting a paygate in front of every piece of substantive editorial content isn't helping.
- profunctor 1y agoHow do you expect them to make a living? News and magazines were always behind a paygate.
- micromacrofoot 1y agoI'd be a lot more likely to pay if they didn't do everything possible to make the experience unpleasant. Even if you pay you still get served ads, bombarded with trackers, and half the time publications make unsubscribing incredibly hostile (if not impossible online). It's no wonder half the population gets their news solely from reshared headlines on social media.
- thepryz 1y agoI haven't read the story yet, but found it ironic that when I went to the site, a story about reading was locked behind a paywall that managed to leave the audio version of the story available to listen to instead.
- floatingtorch 1y agoIn the age of LLMs vacuuming up all content and deriving all the economic value from it, can you blame them?
- mNovak 1y agoSites like the New Yorker have had pay walls since before LLMs entered the scene, and moreover they purposely make their content available freely to those web crawlers that are supposedly robbing them (hence why archive links work).
- cantor_S_drug 1y agoThere are few youtube channels where host reads lot of publications on a particular current topic and gives his opinion summarizing the articles. This way news publications don't get monetary benefits but the youtube channel does. People who are just lazy to read will invariably gravitate to such methods of consuming news. I remember there was an article where one account was shared among the whole institution. It's exactly that but at a much wider scale. I expect crack down on fair use by such publications on those news channel.
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoI don't see how they can crack down on this. Summaries don't infringe copyright, from what I can tell.
- coliveira 1y agoI don't blame these people. I like to read things that matter; but reading news, especially the way they're badly written these days, is better avoided.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y agoThis article, and the New Yorker in general, seem like a good reason why people aren't reading. If you want to KNOW "What's Happening to Reading?" - you're better off taking this article, and summarizing it in Gemini or ChatGPT or whatever. If, instead, you want to READ ABOUT "What's Happening to Reading?" - something thoughtfully put together that paints an elaborate picture and is written for the audience who enjoys this kid of thing (getting smaller by the day) - this is for you. Most people are too busy - whether because they're actually busy or artificially busy with social media and other things that aren't actually good for them - to have time for leisure reading.
- contagiousflow 1y agoI don't think you read the article at all...
- easterncalculus 1y agoOne widely discussed study, for instance, judges students on their ability to parse the muddy and semantically tortuous opening of “Bleak House”; this is a little like assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses. WTF. Asking university English students to read a book is not asking swimmers to go through molasses.
- watwut 1y agoTo be fair, the opening is exactly the sort of clunky writing paragraph that you can normally feel free to skip.
- bmiekre 1y agoThis gave a literal LOL
- easterncalculus 1y agoI definitely didn't abbreviate WTF when I read that. It gets worse too. “Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy,” Dickens wrote. Claude takes a more direct path: “Gas lamps glow dimly through the fog at various spots throughout the streets, much like how the sun might appear to farmers working in misty fields.” Claude doesn't even get this right. The sentence is comparing how the gas lamps and the sun appear to each other, how they both "loom". That's missing completely from Claude's summary.
- bee_rider 1y agoThe only tricky thing about the Dickens bit is that it uses that archaic meaning of “divers” that I’m only familiar with because of the Joanna Newsom time travel/romance/trench warfare/birds album.
- jazzypants 1y agoGod, I'm so happy I saw this live in concert. She is incredible.
- doka_smoka 1y ago[flagged]
- thesuitonym 1y agoIt's worth noting that for most of human history, all writing has been behind a paywall.
- doka_smoka 1y agoFor most of the history in context of the article, libraries have been a thing
- thesuitonym 1y agoYes, but its only in the last hundred or so years that public access libraries have been the norm.
- bmiekre 1y agoSign up for Libby, get free New Yorker articles from library. Remember libraries?
- retskrad 1y agoReading text is a recent phenomenon and the brain doesn't have hardware acceleration. I'm not surprised that less and less people read long form text. Becoming an intermediate reader is exhausting when you didn’t grow up with books. After 500 hours, I can only navigate titles like The Selfish Gene with middling comprehension. Black text on white background feels flat and dopamine free, yet the grind itself becomes the reward, and social media’s quick hits lose their appeal.
- sandy_coyote 1y agoDespite this comment's dubiety, this is a good point. Text communication is only about 8,000 years old IIRC, which is quite recent in human development.
- B1FF_PSUVM 1y agoYou can knock off a few millennia there, and if you want to include most of the population, barely a century or two. Literacy was needed to read the Bible and operate machinery, and now we have videos for that. Only (some of) the video makers need to read, so they can raid the libraries for material.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoNow ask how old working a sedentary 9-5 is
- chrisweekly 1y agoYour comment is very well-written, which is usually a sign of someone highly literate and well-read. I'm very curious about your story as an "intermediate reader" with "500 hours" of reading under your belt. TIA for any further details you're willing to share.
- edavison1 1y agoI don't know if you're alluding to it and I just missed the sarcasm but their comment is at least partially computer generated. Last sentence is classic bot talk coded.
- MichaelRo 1y agoWell, when I was a kid in the 80s in communist Romania, life was a lot similar to 19th century than what someone in Western countries was experiencing. No TV (obviously no computers), so most significant form of entertainment came from reading primarily. I never read "classics" or the books that were on school's compulsory list but I did read anything I could get my hands on and looked entertaining. I recall seeing the movie https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065207/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065207/ first time, some time after the fall of communism and invasion of cable TV and thinking, "I know this story!" because I read the book like 5 times, without knowing there's a movie too. Anyhow, short answer to: "What's Happening to Reading?": it's being replaced by video content as primary source of entertainment. Main drive behind mass reading was amusement, not practicality. Now that amusement no longer requires (much) reading, the general level of literacy of the public is not exceeding that.
- ssttoo 1y agoSimilar experience in neighboring Bulgaria. I remember my dad being upset with me for wasting my time reading “readable little books” (my best effort at approx. translation) meaning fiction, as opposed to proper textbooks.
- MichaelRo 1y agoTimes have changed. My kid and the kids of every friend I know around me, have never opened a book on their own volition. Ever. Although they open the phone, tablet and laptop many times a day. And it's not like they're stupid or anything, just have no desire to read, never learned to associate reading with something pleasurable. But ... it shows. Like a friend has a kid who took the national exam that marks the end of secondary school (gymnasium) this year. He told me one question that was asked. Basically a conversation between John and George, John asking "George, will you start working or continue wasting your time doing nothing?", and George replies: "Right now I'm going to get the scissors to cut some leaves for the dogs". Question was, "What will George do? a) Start working or b) Continue wasting his time". Kid chose "a) Start working" because as he argued, he goes after scissors and uses them to cut leaves, which is work. Asked my kid the same question, got the same answer: he'll start working. Well, but if they would have read a few books, they would have encountered the Romanian expression "cutting leaves to the dogs" as an idiom for laziness, lack of work, doing nothing. So they don't read anymore and it shows.
- yesfitz 1y agoThis article provides a lot to think about. To paraphrase some ideas poorly: > "LLMs can make difficult books accessible to more readers (like Cliff's Notes or Blinkist), BUT some books shouldn't be summarized because the difficulty is part of the importance." > "An A.I. companion throughout life could be a powerful tool for reflection and memory, BUT my human wife and I (who are capable of love) fill this role for each other." The author's a reader and writer, and I was initially grateful to see there wasn't pearl-clutching around the impending impact of Large Language Models on literacy. But then I felt like it should have been more of a call to action, either to reject or embrace AI. I wonder if this it the "acceptance" stage of grief for AI skeptics like myself.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 1y ago> BUT some books shouldn't be summarized because the difficulty is part of the importance. It's not even about the difficulty. Why is there this insistent demand to have summaries of everything? Summaries never fully capture a book. If someone told me they only ever read the Cliff's Notes of books, then I simply wouldn't say they read the books. This need to jump to the finish line right away might be more "accessible", but it's also just ignoring and butchering the whole point of the book, which isn't to extract little nuggets of summarizable information, but to be read.
- androng 1y agoFreuqntly after reading books like "Ray Dalio Principles" and "The hard thing about Hard things" and "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck", they are so long that I forget the point of the book and just never put it into my own words so I forget everything unless its been repeated throughout the book 6 times. there's no knowledge check at the end of most books. So like the article says I just subscribe to blinkist now and save the effort.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 1y agoThat's because those books (very popular in airports) are blog posts extended out into books with almost no value add as a result aside from some "choice" anecdotes intended to prove whatever points they're making. Usually it's the same point people have been making for 4+ decades. The act of reading books like those, deciding to read a self-help book for example, is almost more important than whichever book you pick. Most of them are interchangeable. They're meant to make you think you're improving yourself by reading them. (Dalio is more trying to position himself as master of the universe.) Actual academic monographs and good novels are usually book length because their arguments and stories (and characters) require that book length to reach their full potential.
- Filmatic 1y agoYeah, taking those as one's examples is the equivalent of judging the medium of film by watching YouTube "brain rot" videos. "These were a waste of time and I didn't get anything out of them". Well, yeah. That entire genre (I'm back to treating of self-help and pop-business and "surprising" pop-science books) is infamous for being all but entirely garbage, defying Sturgeon's usual "90% of everything is crap" and achieving something more like 99.9%—and even that may be a generous assessment.
- dehrmann 1y ago> Dalio is more trying to position himself as master of the universe Which is funny because there's an argument that his skill isn't actually predicting economic effects of debt, but running a hedge fund.
- Havoc 1y agoNoticed this in myself. Number of books read per year absolutely cratered even while I’d say I’m reading more words in raw quantity
- bilater 1y agotoo long - anyone has the tldr?
- B1FF_PSUVM 1y ago> the number of thirteen-year-olds who read for fun “almost every day” fell from twenty-seven per cent to fourteen per cent. Haha. Liars. Less than one percent, tops.
- TheAceOfHearts 1y agoI think it's fine to pick up a story in whichever modality you find most engaging, and in the long term AI tools will supercharge this. New modalities of presentation will make media more accessible to a wider audience, so they can benefit and learn from it, even if some of the magic is lost in translation. Consider how many more people got to experience Lord of the Rings thanks to the Peter Jackson movies, who otherwise would've never picked up the books. To a certain extent, translations which play with the presentation and complexity of the text have already been around for hundreds of years. Just compare all the translations of the Bible. Some modernized retellings of classic stories are quite delightful, like Stephen Fry's series of classic Greek mythology. Personally, I can't wait to generate an anime based on Penrose's The Road To Reality.
- KPGv2 1y ago> New modalities of presentation will make media more accessible to a wider audience, so they can benefit and learn from it, even if some of the magic is lost in translation. I think a flaw in your argument here is that you're dismissing the possibility that specific expression of an idea is the modality. Consider, for example, summarizing a poem. You aren't just losing some magic. You're losing the entire point.
- nsriv 1y agoExactly this. On the less artistic side, I've seen so many critiques of popular self-help books for being anecdote heavy and people sharing (or even selling!) summaries of the key bullet points, and the whole point is to develop a resonance with the author to drive home the point. Otherwise it's now just a listicle.
- libraryatnight 1y agoMost people aren't getting the point anyway. The surface idea was always enough for them. It's a hard-knock life when you realize you're staring into the blank face of a man for whom science fiction is just war in space with cooler guns and aliens. In the US, it's a culture of point missing. From Punisher Skull tattoos on our police to racist Star Trek fans, missing the point is mostly what the people around you are doing and they get testy when you point it out.
- ahamilton454 1y agoThis was a pretty thoughtful piece and a pleasure to read. My gut reaction at first was that it was going to be some critque on children not reading due to generative ai (a cynial piece), but it was quite an interesting reflection on simply how reading is changing from the prepective of this author whose spent a his life deeply reading books The ending had a nice flair of grandness to it as well.
- dsign 1y agoOnce upon a time, reading and books were for the elites. The printing press and the Enlightenment changed that and, time passed, we got other forms of entertainment that required less and less mental investment. Now anybody can choose to inflict themself with either literacy or vote-for-Trump mental acumen. Maybe touching the inner mind of high-flying human thinkers will become a thing for the elites again, with the silver lining that access to books will be slightly less about how golden is one’s cradle.
- B1FF_PSUVM 1y ago> choose to inflict themself with either literacy or vote-for-Trump mental acumen If you read enough books, you'll reach "vote-for-Trump mental acumen" again, if nothing else just to rile up the semi-literates.
- asimpletune 1y agoSummarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward. Even the idea that knowledge is something that is capable of being transferred is something that has to be assumed at one’s peril. On the other it's those of us who’ve read in the old school style, for fun, in private that are more convinced of the opposite than anyone. If anything getting summaries might be the worse of both worlds because one might be left with the false impression of understanding where there is none. Anyways, as was pointed out elsewhere in the thread, even English majors and other serious literary people often have no idea what they’re talking about, which just goes to show that people who were going to read will do it regardless of what else is happening in their life, and people who weren’t going to read will not read even if it’s their major. In this sense, LLMs don’t really change anything. The same person operating the tool will continue to be the same person in either case.
- compacct27 1y agoAnother part of what happened is that the comment section feels more succinct and insightful than the actual article. Articles have to be long form, comments get to the point. It's sort of like your comment is the LLM response I wanted all along. And now we can personalize our reading and have a more meaningful outcome. Maybe long form content solved a need back in the day when things were printed on paper and figured out well in advance, crossing their fingers on the relevance, and with where we are now we can suss it out without all the reading-as-middleman-to-knowledge
- yannyu 1y agoIt seems like you're saying almost the exact opposite of the person you're responding to. "Reading" an article through its comments makes the assumption that those commenting actually read and understood the article. This seems like a risk though, as there is an entire ecosystem of people who are just knowledgeable enough to be listened to by those with the same or slightly less knowledge of the content or field. How many times have you sent a meme or made a referential comment about some piece of media that you've never even seen? Big Lebowski, Breaking Bad, and American Psycho memes are completely intelligible across the internet even though many people have never actually seen them. I think the argument of the person that you're responding to is that these dilettantes would exist regardless of the tools that were out there, LLMs or otherwise. There have always been people that prefer to talk about things than to read and consume them. The assumption that long form content is a relic and that reading is no longer necessary for knowledge seems absolutely crazy to me, but it does seem to be a common enough mindset that I've run into it with students that I mentor. It seems logical to me that if you could learn something in one hour, then by definition your knowledge in that subject can not be deep. But it seems like there are plenty of people that I work with and talk to that think a crash course or podcast is all you need to be an expert in something.
- throwmeaway222 1y agoPromise of AI: All text will be generated Result: No text will be read by anyone except AI
- kevindamm 1y agoWill the small web still survive?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kridsdale1 1y agoAs long as there are dorks obsessed with mini painting, trains, odd fish, old knitting patterns, there will be communities and blogs for them.
- footy 1y agoMy manager and I had a conversation about this in a recent one on one and I realized I may just never read a new author if they were published after 2020 again. At least not without a very solid recommendation. I have negative interest in what LLMs write.
- LocalPCGuy 1y agoI don't begrudge them their ability to make a living, but it is a bit ironic that I can't read an article about reading without a subscription or archival service. I get that isn't really the point of the article, but I do think that news/magazines inability to find a way to successfully move beyond the heavily subsidized advertising-supported model (and so the current clunky experience in general) cannot help inspire more people to read. Not claiming it actively reduces readers as a whole, just that it's one less avenue for increasing the desire to do so.
- Animats 1y agoFrom the article: "About midway through my graduate program, I had to sit for a general exam—an hours-long cross-examination conducted by three professors. The exam was based on a reading list, distributed a year in advance, that spanned nearly the whole of English literature, from Beowulf to “Beloved,” and included items like “Joyce, Ulysses,” and “Yeats, Poems.” I read day and night; to persevere without eyestrain, I had to buy a special lamp, and a magnifying glass on a stand." And get off my lawn. Actually, young people are writing more. Before the Internet, many people out of school never again wrote a full paragraph. Now they write a few every day.
- pessimizer 1y agoPeople are so much more literate than they were even a short time ago. Having to type in order to participate on the internet and the Harry Potter phenomenon both seriously upgraded world literacy in general. edit: > [...]the number of thirteen-year-olds who read for fun “almost every day” fell from twenty-seven per cent to fourteen per cent. Also, the number of thirteen-year-olds who read 10-50K words on the internet daily but don't consider it reading shot up to 100%
- Loughla 1y agoAre 13 year olds reading on the Internet though? My experience working with the youth is that they consume video, not written material
- SamBam 1y agoEvidence?
- coliveira 1y agoYou have no idea what teens are doing, it is mostly video all day long.
- tolerance 1y agoThe issue is reading comprehension. Not the mere ability to read.
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- snickerbockers 1y agodid they really just paywall an article about how nobody reads things anymore?
- taco_emoji 1y agotldr
- sw030695 1y ago"There’s something both diffuse and concentrated about reading now; it involves a lot of random words flowing across a screen, while the lurking presence of YouTube, Fortnite, Netflix, and the like insures that, once we’ve begun to read, we must continually choose not to stop." Ironically straight after reading this was an inline video advertisement, and this page crashes constantly (2.6 GB memory usage for an article?)
- dr_dshiv 1y agoRemember reading “highlights” and getting scholastic magazines where you could choose which books to buy? Good luck finding that kind of ambient infrastructure for pleasure reading today…
- smeej 1y agoI'm not sure what's happening, but I am sure it isn't new. I had to learn the hard way 15 years ago that the average American adult cannot parse a full-page email in standard English. It seemed crazy to me at the time and seems crazy to me now, given that the average adult has completed elementary school, but most people are barely functionally literate at all. I don't expect you to believe me. It's a weird claim. But walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you. Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak the same words. If you give them time to prepare, they'll probably be able to get through it in a few minutes, but nobody's putting that kind of effort into a text-only email, even if it's important for work. Reading is so difficult as to be a chore for the average person. They don't just see written words and know what they say. They really have to work to get meaning out of written text. With the proliferation of other means of taking in information, many of which require no effort of any kind beyond hitting play and staying within earshot, why would people choose to read? They didn't want to do it before. And now they don't need to do it either.
- hellisothers 1y ago> Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak the same words Is this tru’ish? I’m not refuting it I’m just a little shocked this might be the situation we’re in. I know generally people now struggle to consume long form content but it even being able to read a story?
- bombcar 1y agoIt’s probably true insofar as if random assholes accost me and ask to read a page from a book I’m more likely to employ old Anglo Saxon than engage with their stupidity.
- watwut 1y agoA weirdo approaches you with a highly unusual request. You suspect the goal is to humiliate you or make you into a dummy somehow, which is actually their goal. No thanks. > I know generally people now struggle to consume long form content but it even being able to read a story? There is reading and then there is reading an unknown text out loud in public while being judged. The two are not the same thing. I had to read publicly when I was a student years ago when smartphones were a new thing. They handed me the text with instructions to reread it at least twice ideally out loud before performing. The point is, it is not like 20 years ago a good student would be expected to read super fluidly out loud in public without at least a little preparation.
- whycome 1y ago> These readers might start a book on an e-reader and then continue it on the go, via audio narration Has this been solved? In a low friction way with good UX. I’m surprised that with Amazon owning Audible there’s not a more streamlined option to switch between an ebook and the audio version.
- rpdillon 1y agoThis has been a thing for years. I've used it dozens of times. https://www.audible.com/ep/wfs https://www.audible.com/ep/wfs
- BobaFloutist 1y agoWow, that's crazy!
- whycome 1y agoThis is cool! Though, in canada that link breaks and there's no mention of it. There should be a way to do this 'manually' with an ebook paired with the audio book. As simple as timestamps embedded in the text?
- roadside_picnic 1y agoInterestingly enough Claude has me reading much more. Especially with math books, one of the greatest challenges to self-study can be making sure you are in fact getting the concepts correct. Without this it's easy to get fairly deep into a book only to give up once you realize you haven't quite built the picture in your head right. Often you do get it, but it takes multiple re-reads/alternate views of the problem. With Claude as I read I can constantly check my understanding. When my response elicits a "Well, not exactly..." I know I have to go back. This combined with the ability to have Claude clarify formula details from a phone picture has rapidly accelerated my learning and has me reading much more these days. Claude is also pretty good at subject specific recommendations, especially when you're looking for a specific type of treatment of a subject.
- shakabrah 1y agoWhat I would have given to have had ChatGPT in college stuck reading Barthes.
- interestica 1y agoI saw an example recently of a sort of “AI Codec” : A person has to send a message to a respected figure of authority. They organize their thoughts and requests into a clear and concise bulleted list with explanations. But, that seemed heavily informal and unprofessional. So they used AI to convert the bullets to paragraphs and sent it out. The authority received the large body of text but, due to time commitments and attention, they didn’t have time to read it all. They used AI to convert the text to a concise bulleted list.
- jobigoud 1y agoThis is great. Maybe this hints at a different approach, instead of asking the LLM to expand the bullets into paragraphs we could ask it to generate a text that, when asked to be summarized by an LLM will produce the original bullets.
- shiandow 1y agoWhat's happening to reading? Followed by several popups that unaccountably take ages to make themselves known and prevent me from reading the damn article. Not the point they wanted to make, but a point nonetheless.
- swayvil 1y agoReading is very drug-like. Staring for hours. Focusing your attention on this visually-inspired, elongated mental event. It alters your consciousness for sure. And we're pushing it on kids. Some of the most enthusiastic readers I know are also opiate addicts.
- xorvoid 1y agoFor many people, paywalls may be bringing the age of traditional text to an end.
- maksimur 1y agoI wonder if we even need to consume content by reading, as opposed to watching or listening, to be neurologically healthy and developed, considering it's something we didn't start doing until a few thousand years ago. Isn't reading kind of a specialization of watching?
- nomadygnt 1y agoIn my mind reading is more similar to thinking than watching. I have no basis for this but it just feels more mentally active. Of course it could just be my biases but I feel it is much easier to passively watch or listen to something rather than to read. But also I would say from my own experience writing and speaking promote “neurological health” even more so maybe the method of consumption is not as important as long as there is sufficient synthesis and thought on the other end.
- chillingeffect 1y agoWe don't need to, in the sense that we survived without it. However a key difference between reading and passively listening or watching is the ability to dynamically vary the pace and re-thread ideas together. E.g. to slow down during complex parts, e.g. involving lots of pronouns, tenses, or familial relations, to move your eyes around on the page, and even to pause a moment to quiz and rehearse to ones' self on the material. To even attempt to connect it with existing ideas from other sources. While theoretically possible with non-linear media like videos and audio playback, the fluidity of reading is far superior. Thus, passive consumption leads to many fragments of ideas remaining atomized and not sticking. In contrast, reading allows one to efficiently stitch numerous ideas together. The point of reading is not to become convinced or apprehend a single summarizable point. Rather, it is to fill one's memory banks with thoughts, experiences and ideas that can be combined with other ones and synthesize new information. Contrast wandering though a botanical garden, reading labels and looking at plants on the one hand. On the other hand, picture a slow-moving bus that rolls continuously through the garden. The bus may pause from time to time, but mostly it remains on the path, letting you watch things go by from a distance. Both means of travel "get you through" the garden, but the self-pacing version allows a personal connection to the information. So it would be convenient for a farmer to have his animals illiterate, yet capable of listening passively to commands over loudspeakers. And to the farmer, it would be inconvenient for these animals to learn to read and explore material on their own which would eventually lead them to an awareness that they don't want to be fenced in, farmed, and eaten. So you can see why some questionable leaders are comfortable with illiteracy as a means of control. While others seek to empower humanity through encouraging reading.
- Frotag 1y ago> It’s reasonable to argue that some kinds of writing shouldn’t, or perhaps can’t, be summarized. [...] maybe a chatbot could explain them to you more clearly than Hofstadter does—but length and difficulty are part of the point of that book I get that there's an emotional payoff to things like flowery prose. It helps put you in the mindset of the author / characters, which makes seeing them overcome whatever problems all the more satisfying. That's what I expect if I pick up a book about say, friends-since-birth being torn apart by war, with one entering the military and committing atrocities to reunite them. On the other hand, if I pick up a book about deciphering alien language found on the moon, I'm not reading for the characters. I'm reading to see how hypothetical aliens would think. Which in practice is often "what would humans be like if we added / removed constraint X" (eg perfect empathy or genetic memory). In this case, lengthy prose and other character development just feel like filler. Like I don't actually care that the character became interested in linguistics after growing up on a farm and watching animal behavior. Just tell me about the aliens!
- orsenthil 1y ago"maybe a chatbot could explain them to you more clearly than Hofstadter does—but length and difficulty are part of the point of that book" This the crux of this article which I agree with. Read it.
- wosined 1y agoI really don't get what is the point of articles such as this one. Maybe writers should focus on writing less bloated articles with clear prupose and AI reading would be unnecessary or at least not as frequent. At least there could be some claim or hypothesis, some evidence or counter-evidence, but this is just a string of weakly related observations without any real overarching explanation. Just a mind dump or barf.
- karaterobot 1y ago> In our current reading regime, summarized or altered texts are the exception, not the rule. But over the next decade or so, that polarity may well reverse Most people don't read many books as it is. That's sad, but it's true for a couple decades. Those people will continue not reading. Of the remainder, some people will continue to read books because reading books is enjoyable. It's not a chore, it's fun, so there is no reason to try to automate it away. Another portion of people who read books only read them to get through them. Usually that's either because they want to understand some idea in them, or sometimes just so they can say they've read the book. These are the people who will use AI to summarize books rather than reading them line-by-line. I have zero problems with that, personally. That's not existentially troubling to me at all. Nah, not too worried. Not about this anyway. The thing that worries me about the future of literature is customization. I think having a shared monoculture—even a canon—is a good thing that we should strive for. We need it, to be part of the same community. The day that AI can easily just spin out a book that's exactly what you ask for, there won't be any reason for any two people to read the same books, let alone the same twenty million people. That will just accelerate the cultural fragmentation and attended alienation our culture has been living through for a while.
- keiferski 1y agoI don’t really buy this narrative anymore, and I think it’s more a reflection of individualist technologists than how regular people interact with culture. A big percentage of what’s read or watched is driven by what other people are reading or watching and has nothing to do with personal preferences. Just look at the Netflix shows that become extremely popular and watched by huge amounts of people, mostly to be discussed online or with friends. That behavior isn’t going away just because an AI can make a book or show tailored to my consumer preferences.
- karaterobot 1y agoThere may be a bit of that—watching things so that you can talk about them with other people. But, when I've done that (in the last 5 years or so), it's usually because there are one or two people I know who want to talk about a show. It's never been show that everyone I knew was watching. The same is true of books, only moreso, since I only know a few other people who regularly read for pleasure, and with whom I might share a reading experience. So it may be hyperbolic to say that no two people will be reading the same books, I think it's directionally true that we'll continue getting more and more narrowcasted, personalized content over time, thanks to AI, and devoting a larger portion of our time watching it, compared to content aimed at a wider audience.
- pixelmonkey 1y agoI wrote a little on this topic in "Putting Your Media on a Diet": https://amontalenti.com/2024/01/31/media-diet https://amontalenti.com/2024/01/31/media-diet Written in Jan 2024. I sensed that the world had already moved on from reading as a core source of information and awareness of the world. But in that essay, I tried to make the case that this is a mistake -- that the environment has never been better for deep readers, that the internet and the various sources of cheap/free long-form text can be a deep reading utopia, if properly curated. But that's the issue. Most people click into the default. They don't curate. They don't monitor their media diet. And so they are drawn, like moths to a flame, to short-form video (especially), as well as other passive information sources that resemble TV and talk radio from prior eras.
- vivzkestrel 1y agoToo many people writing is a problem they have not discussed in this article. Information is too diluted. I dont have the time to read 5000 books on forex trading. What I want is an LLM crunching all 5000 forex trading books into one book with very concise information. I could apply this idea to "Value investing", "Cookbooks", "Startups", "Business", "Finance" and so on. Does anyone here on HN have an LLM capable of doing this or working on something along these lines?
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- zkmon 1y agoOfcourse, the publishers care about decline in reading. Readers care about their priorities in life, and how to distribute their attention across what matters most to them. If social networking matters most, it deserves more attention. Further, knowledge-seeking and cramming your memory with all sorts of facts is no longer a necessity. Even in the past, Europeans were able to advance the knowledge and science only because their priorities and socio-political conditions allowed it, unlike other parts of the world which were always subjected to survival struggles.
- rwoerz 1y agoThe provided text explores the significant transformation of reading in the digital age, contrasting traditional reading habits with contemporary practices influenced by technology and artificial intelligence. --- ### The Evolution of Reading A few decades ago, *reading was a straightforward, private activity*, where individuals engaged with physical texts at their own pace. The internet, however, has fundamentally shifted this experience. While some still prefer traditional books, many now encounter texts through various digital platforms, often switching between formats like e-readers and audio narration. The constant presence of distractions like YouTube and Netflix means that reading today often requires a conscious effort to *choose not to stop*. --- ### Declining Traditional Reading Rates This shift has been particularly pronounced among younger generations. The *National Endowment for the Arts* reported a decline in adults reading at least one book a year, from *55% to 48%* over the decade leading up to 2023. More dramatically, the *National Center for Education Statistics* found that the number of *thirteen-year-olds who read for fun "almost every day" plummeted from 27% to 14%* in roughly the same period. This decline has led to increased concerns from college professors about students' ability to engage with complex, lengthy texts. --- ### The "Gutenberg Parenthesis" and the Rise of AI The text discusses the concept of the "Gutenberg Parenthesis," suggesting that the internet closed a historical period dominated by print, returning us to a more conversational and decentralized communication style. The rise of podcasts and newsletters supports this idea of a "secondary orality." However, the emergence of *artificial intelligence (AI)*, particularly large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude, introduces a new dimension to this evolution. These AI systems "read" and process unimaginable quantities of text at superhuman speeds, recalling information, drawing connections, and extracting insights. This has led some, like economist Tyler Cowen, to consider "writing for the AIs," envisioning a future where AI can analyze and preserve a writer's thought process. --- ### AI-Assisted Reading and the Future of Text AI's capabilities allow for *new forms of reading, such as on-demand abridgments and summaries*. Tools like Blinkist already offer condensed versions of books. AI can also simplify complex texts, as demonstrated by Claude rewriting the challenging opening of "Bleak House" into more modern English. This blurs the line between original texts and their summarized or altered versions, suggesting a future where readers might routinely start with alternative texts and only later seek out originals. While some texts, like complex literary works, may lose their essence when summarized, and the value of authentic human voices will likely persist, the text posits that the *intrinsic integrity of writing might become less powerful*. The analogy of music sampling suggests that "remix culture" could extend to reading, where multiple versions of a text exist and are accepted. The author reflects on their own intensive reading experiences as a Ph.D. student, highlighting the *finitude of human reading and memory*. AI, by contrast, can help find value in otherwise unread texts and potentially deepen reading memories by enabling ongoing interaction with information. However, AI lacks intrinsic motivation and relies on human "reading culture" for its usefulness. The article concludes by contemplating a future where *text is fluid, fungible, and abstractable*. Getting the "gist" of a text will be easy, and encountering the original will become a conscious choice. This could lead to new writing styles, with some writers aiming to repel automated reading, and a shift in what it means to be "well-read." Text may transition from a finished product to a "stepping stone to something else."
- chriscardoz 1y agoI am going to go out on a limb here and say that I have been reading and writing more because of LLMs; not less. Granted, I was a voracious reader in my teens. But, during college, I lost interest in reading. The reason was that I was reading for the sake of reading, and often boring stuff. With the advent of LLMs, I am asking the models interesting questions, getting to know more about the world, going off on adventures and rabbit holes for a topic. Its just like my teens again; voraciously reading interesting stuff. Thats the trick I guess, just read stuff that you find interesting and you will want to read more.
- Nevermark 1y agoThe greatest advantage of long form reading, both fiction and non-fiction, is it scales up our ability to internally and intensely world-build and cathedral-of-concepts build at high scale, high density and at a high resolution of relationships and/or facts. Our imaginations and reasoning become capable of accreting and operating over much larger internal structures deeply and coherently, in the day to week time range. The only other equivalent I can think of in terms of both scale and detail, are major areas of study, which we develop over years or a lifetime, or large engineering projects, such as a large architectural of software project, which we develop over months or a few years. The much faster cadence of books on a daily or weekly basis is an incredible mental workout we can carry on our whole lives. And great preparation and maintenance, for being able to think at both the highest scales and resolutions. I have seen children that got read to every night, when they were tiny, and went on to become avid readers as adults. And children in the same cohort that didn't, who find reading a book very challenging as adults. They are all grown up intelligent, curious, with good jobs, and still know each other. But there is a marked difference in their abilities to think about the world, and the scale of their thinking and interests. Since these children were in a cohort, and still know each other, it is telling that the children that didn't learn to read and enjoy book length reading early in life, are well aware of that difference within the group, and have expressed the wish that they would have had more early exposure to reading books. -- For myself, I was read to as a tot, and then very socially isolated for most of my childhood, with the result that I learned to read voraciously for decades. And would go to great lengths to find ways to earn money to buy books. But even I have a harder time now. There are a lot of insightful and quality blogs and articles to read on the internet, but after that displaced a lot of long book reading, I have noticed the latter presents a greater challenge for me. That it presents a challenge at all is a significant change. Contrary to that, reading formal papers seems to be a great challenge for my mind, in terms of keeping it sharp. A lot of papers require a high intensity of thinking to fully understand. Which strikes me as interesting, and perhaps an untapped opportunity for young readers. I don't know what the young reader fiction or non-fiction equivalent of a formal paper would be. But perhaps a short story mystery or intense subject dive, that required the reader to solve or apply the knowledge in some way would be an interesting format for children. Higher scale puzzle solving, in short form reading format. Perhaps dense essays for children, but highly vetted/curated for being of of genuine natural interest to children. Across a very wide variety of areas, so children have great freedom to pursue their own interests without being pushed or funneled. Traditional childhood subjects of spontaneous study, like dinosaurs, cosmology, animals, cultures, ancient history, how to make things, would all be good areas. I love the idea of having a recognizable format for these essays that somewhat mimics formal papers aesthetically. Gives the children a clear aesthetic signal of what is an intense "chapter sized book", vs. a regular book or other type of reading. And makes the adult activity of learning at the frontier, feel familiar to them very early on. I believe a lot of ways children's potential is wasted is simply not introducing little bits of downstream patterns and aesthetics earlier. Children have an incredible ability to absorb simpler forms of complex "adult brain" subjects early. And when they do, they find the latter much less challenging and more interesting when they eventually encounter them in their full complex/challenging form. Simple feelings of familiarity are so helpful to us emotionally when we encounter a new challenges.