alt Hacker NewsThere's another perspective - everyone and his dog today is reading more than ever because of LLMs (which are really LCPs in 2026 considering the machinery embeds all kinds of concepts in tokens). We ingest more information, condensed or not, than the average PHD scholar did mere 20-30 years ago. That is... by all measures - a lot.
And while many ppls throughout the centuries would never enter a library (and thus many would never consciously talk to AI), we can assume one cannot use AI atm if they don't read through all (or at least some) of its response. Perhaps we'll reach the Lady's Illustrated Primer* at some point (amazing we're not there yet, but we are actually given all the visual artifacts produced by Gees), but right now - everyone on a computer with AI access reads more than they did back in the 90s. It is just not reading off a book.
And there is also a strong argument that reading off the endless (still, sadly) stream of generated text is more beneficial to the person than reading endless nonsense on everyday media. Because media is super biased, and local media even more so.