{"id":26922,"date":"2025-07-28T07:14:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T07:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/26922\/"},"modified":"2025-07-28T07:14:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-28T07:14:09","slug":"read-books-not-ai-summaries-of-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/26922\/","title":{"rendered":"Read Books, Not AI Summaries of Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tech writer Packy McCormick recently went viral with a post on X<\/a> where he offered this \u201cpro tip\u201d: \u201cYou can basically read >100 books per day by asking chatgpt to summarize them for you.\u201d<\/p>\n

He wasn\u2019t being serious; it was a joke meant to provoke conversation. But it resonated because it felt like something people will earnestly argue soon\u2014if they aren\u2019t already. Or perhaps more likely, it\u2019ll be a slightly taboo practice that people still do\u2014as a way to appear well-read or informed\u2014but aren\u2019t eager to admit that they do.<\/p>\n

If SparkNotes appealed to teenagers and college students in my generation\u2014a short cut to actually reading a long book\u2014then surely \u201cAI book summarizing\u201d will be a live temptation going forward. It will be hard to resist a hack that promises the benefits of reading a book (\u201ctakeaways\u201d) without the huge time cost it takes to read hundreds of pages. Life is busy, time is short, and there are way more great books out there than any of us could ever actually read. Why not \u201cread\u201d more books by leaning on AI\u2019s synthesizing prowess, gaining knowledge more efficiently?<\/p>\n

Because it\u2019s a bad trade. It\u2019s like swapping a feast for fast food.<\/p>\n

Bypassing the Pleasure (and Pain) of Process<\/p>\n

Comparative metaphors help us see the wrongheadedness of choosing an AI book summary over actually reading a book. It\u2019s akin to:<\/p>\n

Blending up a 10-course Michelin-restaurant meal into a liquid drink you pound in one gulp
\nReading a Wikipedia plot summary of a Christopher Nolan movie instead of watching it in an IMAX theater
\nBlazing through TV episodes at 2x speed so you can get to the ending to see what happens
\nExploring Paris on Google Maps as a substitute for strolling its streets in person (HT Alan Noble<\/a>)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to understand why technological \u201chacks\u201d are appealing. They promise to decrease pain: the pain of waiting, the pain of process, the pain of limits, the pain of uncontrollable environments and unpredictable outcomes.<\/p>\n

Lure of Shortcuts<\/p>\n

Shortcuts have appealed to humans ever since Eden, when Adam and Eve wanted to gain God\u2019s wisdom but not on God\u2019s terms or timeline. Contemporary technology gives new potency to the age-old pursuit of limitlessness, optimization, and efficiency (what Jacques Ellul called \u201ctechnique<\/a>\u201d).<\/p>\n

Contemporary technology gives new potency to the age-old pursuit of limitlessness, optimization, and efficiency.<\/p>\n

My wife is pregnant, and I\u2019ve been thinking about God\u2019s gracious design for pregnancy as a 9.5-month process. It\u2019s a lengthy ordeal that no doubt feels painfully long for women. Wouldn\u2019t it be easier if we could just get babies like we get socks on Amazon Prime? If \u201cordering\u201d a baby and receiving it via one-day delivery were an option, wouldn\u2019t that be preferable to the agonizingly long, risky process of pregnancy? Most of us would agree this would be terrible. But technologists are hard at work trying to \u201covercome\u201d God\u2019s seemingly inefficient design for baby-making<\/a>. And couples who purchase a surrogate-carried baby<\/a> are already practicing \u201ctechnique\u201d by brazenly defying the impossibility of bearing their own children.<\/p>\n

Our flesh is constantly tempted by shortcuts: bypassing process to get straight to the desired results. But process matters. Get-rich-quick schemes, gambling, diet crazes, \u201cmiracle drugs,\u201d and other shortcut temptations usually backfire.<\/p>\n

God values and dignifies process. He models it himself. He could have snapped his fingers and created the world in one millisecond. Instead, he took seven days. Jesus\u2019s method of discipleship (with Peter, for example), as well as his preferred manner of teaching via question-raising parables, shows he values patient process and faith over \u201ctakeaways\u201d and instant results. Efficiency and optimized time don\u2019t seem to be God\u2019s highest values. Nor should they be ours.<\/p>\n

Value of Reading Beyond Informational \u2018Results\u2019<\/p>\n

If the chief value of reading books was only \u201cpractical takeaways\u201d or \u201cgained knowledge,\u201d AI summaries could probably do the trick. But the act of reading has immense value, which we\u2019re at risk of losing if we let AI do our reading for us. Consider just a few benefits:<\/p>\n

Giving our attention to a book for a long period of time helps us go deeper with and think more sharply about a particular subject, or grow in understanding about other perspectives or life experiences.
\nReading trains our critical-thinking muscles. Time spent reading is like time spent in the gym. The more we do it, the more (intellectually or physically) agile we\u2019ll be.
\nReading helps to grow us in humility and listening. To sit still and actively track with someone else\u2019s perspective or argument without inserting our opinion or storming off mid-conversation is a valuable practice in a world losing the ability\u2014or willingness\u2014to hear others.<\/p>\n

As people of the Book, Christians have another reason to fight for reading: God revealed himself in written words. If the next generation outsources reading to AI and, in the process, loses the capacity to decipher long-form text, what will that mean for biblical literacy and spiritual formation?<\/p>\n

If the next generation outsources reading to AI and, in the process, loses the capacity to decipher long-form text, what will that mean for biblical literacy and spiritual formation?<\/p>\n

A meaningful devotional life requires spending time in God\u2019s Word, not merely asking AI to summarize it for us. To be a \u201cbiblical\u201d Christian isn\u2019t just to have nuggets of biblical knowledge stored in our heads. It\u2019s to be regularly immersed within the pages of Scripture, soaking it up habitually, devouring it eagerly, savoring its truths\u2014which are sweeter than honey (Ps. 119:103).<\/p>\n

AI might be able to engage our heads by synthesizing and summarizing biblical ideas for us. But it can\u2019t engage our hearts by getting us to love God\u2019s Word. Our affections and appetites are trained over time, in the process of soaking in the sweet riches of God\u2019s Word. God doesn\u2019t want to just communicate a few ideas to us in Scripture. He wants to commune with us as we give him our full and eager attention. We train our hearts and minds to experience this attentive communion with God\u2019s Book by experiencing it with other books, as often as we can.<\/p>\n

So ditch the AI summaries and keep reading books!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tech writer Packy McCormick recently went viral with a post on X where he offered this \u201cpro tip\u201d:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26923,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[64,63,457,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-26922","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}