Ask HN: AI robbed my joy of reading books?

[hasudon7171]

I use AI everyday(Claude Code, ChatGPT, and so on..), and I'm used to getting answer immediately from AI. I read the novel for the first time in several months, But I couldn't concentrate. I felt a strong urge to skip ahead and know the ending right away.

AI can summarize books for free. It seems efficient at first glance. but I'm concerned that AI has robbed my joy of reading books. If you compare that getting a quick book summary from AI for free with investing the time and money to actually read it, which approach will truly become a part of you ten years from now?

[tim-tday]

AI has made me enjoy reading more. I enjoy the opportunity to sit on the couch and embrace the slower cadence of the writing. Ive been reading Sci Fi lately but I really enjoy the story in “Napoleon A Life” (history has been something my education lacked this one is a really compelling story)

Might I suggest finding an author who you resonate with based on how the language is rings and not so much what the story tells. Poetry is good for this if you can get into it.

Or books where you can read a little thing and think about it for hours. Meditations by Marcus Arailius is a good one. The Prophet by Kahil Gibran is another good one. Ficciones By Borjes is another. These are books where a little bite can set you thinking for an hour breaking you out of the frantic flow of modern life.

[hasudon7171]

thanks for opinion from a different perspective. I had never read a book that think about it for hours

[vga1]

You could have read the wikipedia article to find out the ending for 10+ years already.

[hasudon7171]

Could you understand something as an actual experience simply by reading a Wikipedia article?

[adithyaharish]

Totally agree, my attention span has become signifiantly low that I would rather use claude code rather read a book now, though I enjoy reading articles now

[hasudon7171]

I enjoy reading the articles, too. At the same time, however, I find myself unable to suppress the urge to rush straight to the conclusion.

[adithyaharish]

True that infact, the tools now have TL;DR section which forces me to only real the conclusion

[eimrine]

Your post is not applicable to scientific textbooks at all because they do not have a conception of ending.

Your post might be partly applicable to philosophy book. Some books just can not be summarized (for example David Dennet's books - they are too good to let me interrupt the reading), but some books is just not readable to me (most of XX-century philosophy) and in this case LLM works like a charm.

Your post is kind of applicable to fiction books, but anyway I consider them useless. Last time I have read that book was "Hyperboloid of Garin the engineer" because my friend has recommended me to read with drawing a parallel to Elon Musk's business and the most possible endgame for this person. In this situation AI has no value, there is no other way to feel Garin's way, not to peek at Garin's end.

Same with any book of good fiction - peeking at the end do not make this book as finished for you. Asking LLM to draw that parallel instead of you might get rid of reading for you, but your consciousness will not have the person of Garin no matter what prompt you will feed at megacorp.

[hasudon7171]

It certainly depends on what kind of book I read.