AI Erodes a Legacy of Reading - by Philip Su
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AI Erodes a Legacy of Reading<br>Our ability to read may become vestigial as we're inundated by text.
Philip Su<br>Jun 26, 2026
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Everybody’s got a difference sense for what things are acceptable fast.<br>About a decade ago, a friend of mine said he started watching TV shows at 2x. This seemed to me ridiculous at the time, and if I’m honest, continues to go against the spirit of enjoying television. I watch many videos online at 2-3x, but those videos are mostly informational and have little meaningful emotional content. I still have a hard time imagining enjoying a TV drama at 2x, though.<br>Then again, I listen to podcasts at 3.7x. It’s taken me around 15 years to get up to that speed, starting from 1.25x and slowly ratcheting up through the years. My habits here are a huge part of why Superphonic: a) is the only player that goes up to 5x, and b) allows 0.1x increments because that’s what you need to smoothly ratchet your listening speed. When I first started listening at 2x and beyond, jokes weren’t funny because the timing was off. Nowadays, I laugh at jokes even at 3.7x. The mind is malleable.<br>Years ago I started flipping to Page 3 of online recipes because SEO incentivized recipe authors to insert multipage preambles about how this particular lasagne was something their paternal grandmother used to cook for sick members of the extended family shortly after the war using only what scrap foods were available at the time. SEO is why no recipe online ever starts on the first page.<br>One in four American adults don’t read even part of any book in an entire year. As reading online becomes increasingly popular, so has the skimming of articles — the visual equivalent of watching TV at 2x.<br>The death of word-for-word long form reading is a travesty.
It amuses me that AI inserted Sapiens unbeckoned in the book pile.<br>Deluge-Induced Collapse of Reading
Traditional barriers to publication were also served as a form of selection bias pressure towards higher quality. Back when printing presses were rare, you had to decide very carefully what to print. When the self-publishing of books used to be expensive, literary agents and publishers acted as helpful quality filters when deciding what to read.<br>Nowadays anyone can publish a Substack, including yours truly. Amazon’s CreateSpace allows anyone to upload a PDF (for free!) to sell both Kindle and print forms of their book. When the cost of something goes to zero, you can bet you’ll get a lot more of it.<br>We are being veritably inundated by words. This is causing us to skim everything, looking for unexpected words and pausing occasionally to consume a whole sentence or perchance even an entire paragraph.<br>The long-form essay is dead.<br>There’s loss of trust around authorship . As AI is increasingly used by even well-known writers, I’m less and less convinced each word was specifically intended by the author. An author spending less time on writing makes me want to spend less time on reading.
Content queues have become infinite . I used to save stuff to my Watch Later list on YouTube and my Save for Later list on Facebook. But after a few years, I’ve come to realize they’re basically guilt-free trash cans, not actually repositories, because I’ve rarely ever consumed content once I mark it for “later.” This is mostly because the amount of new content streaming at our faces each day is already so overwhelming that it’s hard to imagine setting aside even more time in order to catch up on past items.
Summarizers will be needed just to survive the flood . As our content worlds get flooded with ever more AI-generated and AI-augmented content, we’ll inevitably need summarizers just to say acceptably on top of our reading lists.
I now find myself skimming articles these days, even ones written by friends, because I’m not sure how much is AI generated. (By the way, this publication is 100% human generated — not just generated, but typed instead of dictated because I find the sentences come out very differently when I type them instead of dictating them. Using AI on any Molochinations article would defeat the primary point of this publication, which is that I enjoy the act and art of writing itself.)<br>Musicians are intentional about the whole of their work. For most of recorded audio history, albums were meant to be listened to as a whole. Artists would agonize over whether a particular song belonged on a specific album because they wanted the whole work to mean something. Listeners respected this intention and listened to albums cover-to-cover. It took much effort to skip individual tracks on records and cassettes, which further led to the standard practice of viewing albums holistically. CDs made skipping easier, and then streaming completely demolished the idea of albums as unitary pieces of art. These days, it’s all about individual tracks.<br>Relatedly, I’ve never believed in abridged versions of novels....