I don’t like reading from a screen, and when I get sent books for review I usually ask for print copies if they’re available. But sometimes they aren’t, which usually means I get them sent to me in a pdf format.
Recently Adobe updated and I noticed that, in the evolution toward everything AI all the time, they’ve added a function that allows you to condense a 300-page novel down to less than 10 pages of summary. “This appears to be a long document,” the prompt says. “Save time by reading a summary using AI Assistant.” That’s probably helpful in some lines of work, and perhaps (more disturbingly) of use to students, but it’s not for me. I don’t read books in order to “save time,” and I don’t see the point of buying a book and then just reading what used to be known as the Reader’s Digest condensed version.
And yet that seems to be something that’s now being incorporated into the form books increasingly take. How many people will be able to resist clicking on that little button? I don’t think it’s alarmist to think that what is being presented as a helpful tool is just another step in the extinction of the book, and of reading.
Alex Good 
It is disturbing. Small features like this are going to cause a brain drain, and they’re not even the worst of it.
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Agree completely. It’s these little things that cause huge shifts.
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The human race continues on its downward trajectory.
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I love the way people are calling it the Disenlightenment now.
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That works!
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Books killed the oral tradition. So something kills books. What are you REALLY worried about?
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That we’re not going back to an oral tradition but something a lot worse.
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Worse than this?
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Bet you’re hoping for a little TL;DR now…..
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Exhaustive and exhausting. But very much a written performance. Guy is basically posting a book he’s written online.
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Death to civilization. Yeah, sounds about right…
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Get a lawn chair out, a cold drink, and sit back and watch it all burn.
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Don’t forget a shotgun to protect the drinks!
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Or at least a machete.
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