At this point auto AI summaries are so prevalent that it is the passive default. By shifting it to require an active choice, you’ve make it more likely for students to choose to do the work.
Alternately, the prof can require that students write out notes, in longhand, as they read, and require that a photocopy of those notes be submitted, along with a handwritten outline / rough draft, to validate the essays that follow.
I think it's inevitable that "show your work" soon will become the mantra of not just the math, hard science, and engineering courses.
It’s not much more effort. The level of friction is minimal. But we’re talking about the activation energy of students (in an undergrad English class, likely teenagers). It doesn’t take much to swing the percentage of students who do the reading.
Indeed the token cost of image inputs are lower because you have more fine grained control of the latent token space