If you thought that A.I.-driven efficiency efforts would be hard to find in literary spheres, you would be sorely mistaken.
Recently, the main literary community on TikTok — more commonly referred to as “BookTok” — faced a harsh divide among its members regarding their stances on the relationship between A.I. and reading.
To preface this discussion, it is important to note that very few communities on TikTok are not influenced by the social media platform’s constant drive to push overconsumption. Unfortunately, BookTok isn’t necessarily known to evade rampant overconsumption. From buying countless copies of the same text to users calling out others for buying numerous books for aesthetic purposes and leaving them unread, the BookTok community is no stranger to consumerist controversy.
Users have also faced criticism for sharing that they’ve completed hundreds of books per year and providing tutorials for others to follow in their footsteps. Though this initially seems harmless, some TikTok users argue that focusing more on the quantity of texts places more emphasis on consumption rather than understanding and comprehension. TikTok user @lori.a.waters explained this criticism in further detail:
“Reading 100 books a year is not actually reading, it’s just consuming. […] There is a difference between reading and consuming. Consuming is just trying to get through as many books as you can. Reading, on the other hand, is being more intentional, slow, letting the story change you and envelop you, and thinking about the characters even after you’ve read the book. And you can’t do that 100 times a year. […] Don’t mistake volume for depth, because there is a difference.”
Though the focus on numbers here isn’t too controversial, the relationship between BookTok and consumption was brought to a whole new outrageous level when BookTok creators began accepting brand sponsorships from platforms selling A.I. tools to make the reading process more efficient.
Essentially, some BookTok influencers are using A.I. to create summaries of books for them to read instead of reading the books themselves. The A.I. tools are advertised to speed up the reading process so readers can rapidly increase the number of books they read on a regular basis.
However, the creators are never even opening the books they claim to have read in the first place.
The rapidly increasing amount of A.I. use for literary purposes has made @lori.a.waters’ argument against rapid reading literal: just as rapidly consuming books for the sake of saying you’ve read 100 books this year doesn’t count as comprehensive reading in the traditional sense, relying on A.I. summaries to “read 100 books a week” is nowhere near equivalent to even reading a single book.
Advertising these rapid-reading A.I. platforms on TikTok feels quite fitting, as they resemble a sort of “doomscrolling” approach to reading: you may scroll endlessly through A.I. summaries of the books you’d like to read — just as you’d scroll for hours on TikTok consuming an endless stream of ever-changing content — but that doesn’t mean you’ll retain anything meaningful, nor will you connect with the text in any substantial way.
Many videos have been made ridiculing the absurdity of using A.I. to “read” hundreds of books per week, and the incapability of replicating the reading experience under the context of efficiency.
In the comment section of a video poking fun at the idea of considering A.I. summaries as a worthy equivalent to books themselves, a TikTok user noted that the biggest issue with this controversy is that A.I. cannot replicate a book’s “soul”:
“I just don’t trust A.I. to give me the soul of a book,” the user stated. “It strips out all the nuance and texture that makes reading worth it in the first place. And honestly, reading a summary is not the same thing as actually reading. That’s like saying you watched the trailer [of a film] and now you know the whole movie — it just doesn’t work like that.”
Other users in the comment section noted A.I.’s overwhelming tendency to make mistakes and “hallucinate,” while others found the advertisements “insulting” to the BookTok community.
Ultimately, it should be obvious that the point of reading is not simply to tell others how you’ve managed to read hundreds of books in a week. Reading can often be a deeply personal activity, or simply just an enjoyable past time, but A.I. deprives books from the characteristics that make reading meaningful. Though turning reading into a commodified performance does not feel far-fetched in this era of rampant, social media-driven consumerism, it cannot be overstated that A.I. has no place in literary spheres.