AI Replaces Reading

Joshua Rothman writes for the New Yorker:

Today, the nature of reading has shifted. Plenty of people still enjoy traditional books and periodicals, and there are even readers for whom the networked age has enabled a kind of hyper-literacy; for them, a smartphone is a library in their pocket. For others, however, the old-fashioned, ideal sort of reading—intense, extended, beginning-to-end encounters with carefully crafted texts—has become almost anachronistic. These readers might start a book on an e-reader and then continue it on the go, via audio narration. Or they might forgo books entirely, spending evenings browsing Apple News and Substack before drifting down Reddit’s lazy river. 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.

This shift has taken decades, and it’s been driven by technologies that have been disproportionately adopted by the young. Perhaps for these reasons, its momentousness has been obscured. In 2023, the National Endowment for the Arts reported that, over the preceding decade, the proportion of adults who read at least one book a year had fallen from fifty-five per cent to forty-eight per cent. That’s a striking change, but modest compared to what’s happened among teen-agers: the National Center for Education Statistics—which has recently been gutted by the Trump Administration—found that, over roughly the same period, the number of thirteen-year-olds who read for fun “almost every day” fell from twenty-seven per cent to fourteen per cent. Predictably, college professors have been complaining with more than usual urgency about phone-addled students who struggle to read anything of substantial length or complexity.

I must also confess. It is hard for me to read a long book these days.