What’s Happening to Reading?
June 18, 2025 at 06:30PMDespite myself, I’ve developed a bottomless appetite for reading about what the rise of AI means for our intellectual lives. (Hell, The New York Times Magazine dedicates most of its most recent issue to that question.) Joshua Rothman takes a decidedly arm’s-length approach here—informed speculation leads the way, with a few data points sprinkled in for texture—but also seems game to confront a future where books are just another fungible text, to be digested in whatever recombinant form suits you best. It’s easy to read this as an admission of defeat; it’s more rewarding to read it as a call to arms.
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: we may routinely start with alternative texts and only later decide to seek out originals, in roughly the same way that we now download samples of new books to our Kindles before committing to them. Because A.I. can generate abridgments, summaries, and other condensed editions on demand, we may even switch between versions as circumstances dictate—the way that, today, you might decide to listen to a podcast at “2x” speed, or quit a boring TV show and turn to Wikipedia to find out how it ended. Pop songs often come in different edits—the clean edit, and various E.D.M. remixes. As a writer, I may not want to see my text refracted in this way. But the power of refraction won’t be mine to control; it will lay with readers and their A.I.s. Together, they will collapse the space between reading and editing.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/06/18/whats-happening-to-reading/
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