I fear in the future people will read even less because of how often people cheap out and use AI to write.
I know the author of this article tells you never to use a single word it suggests, however I still, while reading, am checking for any amount of AI used.
This makes reading less enjoyable, and even a bit stressful.
If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
Everything I post is from my own finger tips, only to get a reply from someone using a bot. I'm tired.
Excessive generative AI output devalues all communication media unfortunately. As a greater and greater portion of text, imagery, audio, and video come to be synthetic, I don't see why anybody would be motivated to do deep reading, or listening, or analysis of said media. It's frightening to think what that might do to our civilization, almost like putting us back into a weird version of the ancient past when nobody was literate, save the priest.
Maybe humans can adapt to care about generated content and treat it with the same emotional weight that human communication has. I don't know if that's good or not.
There is a recent PISA research that students slowly decline in understanding the long reads.
E.g. in one country, 21% of high school students do not even achieve “sufficient reading literacy”…
So the question should be - what are we going to do with this? LLM can produce texts but we as people will not be able to understand anyway…
About PISA research for example here: <a href="https://www.edweek.org/leadership/reading-ability-craters-on-international-exam-both-in-the-united-states-and-abroad/2026/09" rel="nofollow">https://www.edweek.org/leadership/reading-ability-craters-on...
PISA is a statistical measurement tool designed for sensitivity to differences in student performance. So it uses questions that some students are expected to get right and some are expected to get wrong, and places the result on a bell curve fit to a reference population.
It's not clear what you mean by "sufficient reading literacy," but I guess it's one of the PISA proficiency levels. Those are simply equally-spaced intervals on the bell curve. For example, level 1c in reading is 2.4 to 3.1 standard deviations below the reference mean and 21% of participants in Iraqi Kurdistan and Lebanon scored at that level. Relative to the baseline, they are definitely close to the bottom. However, even they must've gotten some questions right, or they would've ended up in the "below level 1c" bucket (like 3% in Iraqi Kurdistan and 5% in Lebanon did). (<a href="https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volume-i_73451bc5-en/full-report/results-for-countries-and-economies_33854635.html#annex-d1e69716-8107cecc98" rel="nofollow">https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum... Table I.B1.2a.11)
If you wanted to know how many people achieve "sufficient reading literacy," you would need a test specifically designed for measuring it (i.e. not PISA), where people with sufficient ability can be expected to get all questions right. For example, the literacy rate is typically defined via the ability to "read and write a simple statement about everyday life," a test which 99% of adults in wealthy countries pass, 92% in Lebanon and 84% in Iraq: <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-rates?country=Europe+and+Northern+America+%28SDG%29~IRQ~LBN" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-ra...
Of course a test that 99% pass just becomes table stakes and boring, whereas PISA with its large differences between individuals is much more exciting, but you shouldn't let that mislead you into thinking that students scoring relatively low on PISA necessarily must be lacking even those table-stakes skills.
S-E-P · · focus · HN ↗
If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
Everything I post is from my own finger tips, only to get a reply from someone using a bot. I'm tired.
jakeinspace · · focus · HN ↗
Maybe humans can adapt to care about generated content and treat it with the same emotional weight that human communication has. I don't know if that's good or not.
sixtyj · · focus · HN ↗
E.g. in one country, 21% of high school students do not even achieve “sufficient reading literacy”…
So the question should be - what are we going to do with this? LLM can produce texts but we as people will not be able to understand anyway…
About PISA research for example here: <a href="https://www.edweek.org/leadership/reading-ability-craters-on-international-exam-both-in-the-united-states-and-abroad/2026/09" rel="nofollow">https://www.edweek.org/leadership/reading-ability-craters-on...
yorwba · · focus · HN ↗
It's not clear what you mean by "sufficient reading literacy," but I guess it's one of the PISA proficiency levels. Those are simply equally-spaced intervals on the bell curve. For example, level 1c in reading is 2.4 to 3.1 standard deviations below the reference mean and 21% of participants in Iraqi Kurdistan and Lebanon scored at that level. Relative to the baseline, they are definitely close to the bottom. However, even they must've gotten some questions right, or they would've ended up in the "below level 1c" bucket (like 3% in Iraqi Kurdistan and 5% in Lebanon did). (<a href="https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volume-i_73451bc5-en/full-report/results-for-countries-and-economies_33854635.html#annex-d1e69716-8107cecc98" rel="nofollow">https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum... Table I.B1.2a.11)
If you wanted to know how many people achieve "sufficient reading literacy," you would need a test specifically designed for measuring it (i.e. not PISA), where people with sufficient ability can be expected to get all questions right. For example, the literacy rate is typically defined via the ability to "read and write a simple statement about everyday life," a test which 99% of adults in wealthy countries pass, 92% in Lebanon and 84% in Iraq: <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-rates?country=Europe+and+Northern+America+%28SDG%29~IRQ~LBN" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-ra...
Of course a test that 99% pass just becomes table stakes and boring, whereas PISA with its large differences between individuals is much more exciting, but you shouldn't let that mislead you into thinking that students scoring relatively low on PISA necessarily must be lacking even those table-stakes skills.