Literacy and reading habits face challenges from AI and changing attention economies

Modern society is experiencing a shift toward a postliterate state, driven by a changing attention economy that prioritizes convenience and quick rewards through social media and artificial intelligence. Educators and researchers note a declining engagement with literature; for instance, Nicholas Dames, a professor at Columbia University, has observed that students struggle to keep up with dense reading syllabi.

This trend is partly attributed to educational shifts, where curricula often favor short excerpts to prepare students for standardized testing rather than requiring the reading of entire books.

Historically, the rise of automated text generation was satirized by Jonathan Swift in his 1726 work, ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. Swift imagined ‘the Engine’, a machine capable of producing books on philosophy, poetry, and politics without the need for genius or study. This literary concept mirrors contemporary concerns regarding large language models and the potential for verbal quantity to outpace verbal quality.