AI is making reading books feel obsolete — and students have a lot to lose

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license Read the original article A perfect storm is brewing for reading AI arrived as both kids and adults were already spending less time reading books than they did in the not-so-distant past A new assessment shows the amount of reading for pleasure that Americans are doing is down since the early s As a linguist I analysis how hardware influences the methods people read write and think This includes the impact of artificial intelligence which is dramatically changing how people engage with books or other kinds of writing whether it s assigned used for research or read for pleasure I worry that AI is accelerating an ongoing shift in the value people place on reading as a human endeavor Everything but the book AI s writing skills have gotten plenty of attention But researchers and teachers are only now starting to talk about AI s ability to read massive datasets before churning out summaries analyses or comparisons of books essays and articles Need to read a novel for class These days you might get by with skimming through an AI-generated summary of the plot and key themes This kind of possibility which undermines people s motivation to read on their own prompted me to write a book about the pros and cons of letting AI do the reading for you Related The anti-AI movement is dangerously misguided Palming off the work of summarizing or analyzing texts is hardly new CliffsNotes dates back to the late s Centuries earlier the Royal Society of London began producing summaries of the scientific papers that appeared in its voluminous Philosophical Transactions By the mid- th century abstracts had become ubiquitous in scholarly articles Expected readers could now peruse the abstract before deciding whether to tackle the piece in its entirety The internet opened up an array of additional reading shortcuts For instance Blinkist is an app-based subscription utility that condenses mostly nonfiction books into roughly -minute summaries called Blinks that are available in both audio and text But generative AI elevates such workarounds to new heights AI-driven apps like BooksAI provide the kinds of summaries and analyses that used to be crafted by humans Meanwhile BookAI chat invites you to chat with books In neither circumstance do you need to read the books yourself If you re a candidate demanded to compare Mark Twain s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with J D Salinger s The Catcher in the Rye as coming-of-age novels CliffsNotes only gets you so far Sure you can read summaries of each book but you still must do the comparison yourself With general large language models or specialized tools such as Google NotebookLM AI handles both the reading and the comparing even generating smart questions to pose in class The downside is that you lose out on a critical benefit of reading a coming-of-age novel the personal increase that comes from vicariously experiencing the protagonist s struggles In the world of academic research AI offerings like SciSpace Elicit and Consensus combine the power of search engines and large language models They locate relevant articles and then summarize and synthesize them slashing the hours needed to conduct literature reviews On its website Elsevier s ScienceDirect AI gloats Goodbye wasted reading time Hello relevance Maybe Excluded from the process is judging for yourself what counts as relevant and making your own connections between ideas Reader unfriendly Even before generative AI went mainstream fewer people were reading books whether for pleasure or for class In the U S the National Assessment of Educational Progress published that the number of fourth graders who read for fun almost every day slipped from in to in For eighth graders From in to in The U K s National Literacy Trust survey revealed that only one in three - to -year-olds announced they enjoyed reading in their spare time a drop of almost percentage points from just the previous year Similar trends exist among older students In a survey of -year-olds across countries disclosed reading only when they had to That s up from about a decade earlier The picture for college students is no brighter A spate of latest articles has chronicled how little reading is happening in American higher mentoring My work with literacy researcher Anne Mangen revealed that faculty are reducing the amount of reading they assign often in response to students refusing to do it Emblematic of the predicament is a troubling observation from cultural commentator David Brooks I once solicited a group of students on their final day at their prestigious university what book had changed their life over the previous four years A long awkward silence followed Completely a candidate declared You have to understand we don t read like that We only sample enough of each book to get through the class Now adults According to YouGov just of Americans read at least one book in The situation in South Korea is even bleaker where only of adults declared they had read at least one book in down from almost in In the U K The Reading Agency observed declines in adult reading and hinted at one reason why In of adults identified as lapsed readers they once read regularly but no longer do Of those lapsed readers indicated they had stopped reading because of time spent on social media The phrase lapsed reader might now apply to anyone who deprioritizes reading whether it s due to lack of interest devoting more time to social media or letting AI do the reading for you All that s lost missed and forgotten Why read in the first place The justifications are endless as are the streams of books and websites making the circumstance There s reading for pleasure stress reduction learning and personal expansion You can find correlations between reading and brain improvement in children happiness longevity and slowing cognitive decline This last issue is particularly relevant as people increasingly let AI do cognitive work on their behalf a process known as cognitive offloading Research has emerged showing the extent to which people are engaging in cognitive offloading when they use AI The evidence reveals that the more users rely on AI to perform work for them the less they see themselves as drawing upon their own thinking capacities A analysis employing EEG measurements uncovered different brain connectivity patterns when participants enlisted AI to help them write an essay than when writing it on their own Related Instead of punishing students for using AI schools must provide clear consistent guidelines and rules It s too soon to know what effects AI might have on our long-term ability to think for ourselves What s more the research so far has largely focused on writing tasks or general use of AI tools not on reading But if we lose practice in reading and analyzing and formulating our own interpretations those skills are at liability of weakening Cognitive skills aren t the only thing at stake when we rely too heavily on AI to do our reading work for us We also miss out on so much of what makes reading enjoyable encountering a moving piece of dialogue relishing a turn of phrase connecting with a character AI s lure of efficiency is tantalizing But it risks undermining the benefits of literacy The post AI is making reading books feel obsolete and students have a lot to lose appeared first on MinnPost