AI Erodes a Legacy of Reading

I’ve found the opposite to be true for myself. I’m so annoyed by all the low-effort AI taking over the internet that I’m reading more now than I ever have before. It’s an activity I can do where I know I’m not going to deal with any AI stuff (assuming I’m reading books more than a few years old). It’s June and I’ve probably read more so far this year than any full year in my life.

Where I’ve used AI is to summarize 90 minute videos that take 70 minutes to get to the point. That seems much more useful than trying to listen at 3.7x speed. Something I recently tried, with pretty good success, was downloading the subtitle file from a video, feeding it to an LLM, and turning it into an article at whatever level of detail I think would be useful. This can save hours and is much more enjoyable than listening to a bunch of chipmunks rambling on. Though the built-in AI on YouTube is often good enough to get the idea and avoid engaging that deeply with people just trying to farm attention.

Anecdotally I recently used a very extended Claude conversation to prepare for a job interview and while it prepared me very well I feel like I was "overfitting" to the model and just conforming to the averages. I have a pile of books that I'm reading right now because I'm not happy with how I prepared.

"I listen to podcasts at 3.7x."

tell me you're crazy without telling me...

We first need to collectively drown in an ocean of AI slop. Only then will we decide to value quality.