You must ask the AI to summarize and dictate to you what you are looking at
You joke but I’ve seriously considered at one point just having chatGPT summarize the novels I wanted to read chapter by chapter so I can still enjoy the story without sitting through hundreds of pages; as someone who considers himself a discerning reader, I also recognize I may as well just have a friend recount the story to me for all the literary value I’ll get out of it. It’s just I’ve lost the ability to focus, I find myself reading the same sentence multiple times to grasp what I just read, and I just can’t seem to maintain interest anymore.
I’ve considered it in the past, but I just can’t make that final leap to having AI just tell me what happens in a story.
Some stories though are a little too…accountant-y? I wanted to read the Baru Cormorant series (okay, that’s a lie; I wanted to listen to it on audible), but then at some point it sounded like it started talking about accounting and I zoned out immediately (early-ish on in the story too). Now there’s a series I feel sad to miss out on.
from someone with ADHD who, as well, flaked to sparknotes for in-class reading throughout high school, the greatest favor you can do for yourself is Not That At All Costs.
reading and similar prolonged focus tasks are, unfortunately, a muscle you have to train. what chatgpt will do will be equivalent of the plot summary on the back of the book but with spoilers, or just pure dry timelining. it’s deleterious to your general comprehension capacities and trains a helplessness instinct if you lean into it. it will have cascading effects on your critical thinking abilities.
if you have not tried audiobooks, try audiobooks. it’s a different neural pathway than reading, which might help, and its still fine for comprehension and critical thought.
I can definitely understand that so much of mental capabilities are a muscle you need to train; I used to love reading when I was growing up; the only other people I knew who loved reading as much as myself was one of my siblings (we didn’t share the same interests though), everyone I went to school with had zero interest in novels unfortunately. I recall spending hours and hours just engrossed in novels, a practice I can’t imagine doing now without forcing myself to continue. I lose interest in the stuff I’m doing (watching stuff, gaming, etc) very quickly, but I do recall when I used to read as a child I could just sit on my bed for hours on end just reading. I used to be able to finish books I liked in 1-2 days, but now I can barely remain interested for more than a handful of minutes at a time. I can’t help but feel there’s a muscle I let deteriorate that is now no longer up to the task.
Basically once content like video games, TV shows and anime became more accessible I ended up leaving reading behind; ironically aside from wanting to be a game developer ever since I was a kid, I also always had my heart set on being a writer (I still have a lot of fleshed out stories in my head I never wrote down), but I also left that behind ages ago. I just don’t have the focus or patience to do what it takes to be a good author (it takes skill to tell a story and to tell it well, and it takes practice to do that, I’m too lazy to practice).
If you want to get back into shape, as it were, try short stories. I’ve been reading Sherlock Holmes and they’re mostly only a few pages each and written for a mass market audience. Turn your brain on exactly as much as you need to either read an entertaining adventure or critically analyze the crime and try to solve it first
Very relatable. I think starting work killed my interest in reading. Only having a couple free hours every day curtails any lengthy reading sessions, and piecemeal stuff is too sporadic, like I can’t squeeze a half hour of fiction reading on a bus trip if I’m lucky to get a seat and then pick it up seamlessly on the commute back. Having the time to deep read and choose when to stop is critical to my enjoyment and understanding of written media.
I have adhd like WhyEssEff, and I struggle with focus while reading, especially after catching covid. And I agree with her that you should NOT USE CHATGPT TO SUBSTITUTE ACCESSIBILITY TOOLS. It will erode your mental capacity even further, there’s research about it.
While I have my own quirks and rituals to help me focus when reading, I have friends with higher support needs than mine, and they swear by audiobooks or other accessibility tools like text-to-speech or sequential readers that read one word at a time (if a wall of text is a sensory impediment for you). Some of them are open source or easily pirated, too.
Please put your accessibility needs to connect to the rich world of literature in the hands of people who understand our struggles and develop tools based on science, and not on Sam Altman’s bullshit machine that will inevitably remove the humanity of any piece of writing out into it.
Honestly my mental faculties are disconcertingly a lot less sharp than they used to be, and I’m not that old (I guess I’m middle aged at this point? Still feels like I’m young in my late thirties); admittedly the last thing I’d need is an AI tool making things infinitely worse. I need to try and use audible more; I own more than a few (good) books on them and should force myself to work on my declining focus.
I feel just about the same, and it’s been humbling realizing I now need to accommodate for myself if I want to have a relatively normal life, while before I just rawdogged adhd symptoms and still got stuff done. It’s never too young or too old to realize we need a bit of support. If someone with much more visible disability told me they’re too young to need their mobility tools, I would correctly recognize that as bs. Same difference with mental struggles.
Hope you don’t have to force yourself, just try different things other people have and see if they work.
The fun is imagining the world being described on the page not reading a bunch of bullet points telling you what happened.
Unfortunately not enough people are taught this I only really learned it cos my dad would read to me before bed every day and he’d get me books we’d read together so we could discuss plot. Without that I’d probably never have given books a chance
Honestly I’d hate to miss out on well written stories; some authors know how to use the written word to really bring their writing to life, and these books are an absolute pleasure to read. I got into reading I think because back in my day there really was nothing else to do; the only console I had was an MSX keyboard (awesome though it was) and I’d re-watched my favorite comedies on VHS a million times, so inevitably I got into reading (starting with horror and computer hacker stories, and then finding my way onto animorphs) and discovered I LOVED how deep literary characters were compared to characters on the screen. Today however I find it hard to stay focused, and I find my mind drifting to literally anything else or just going blank; but regardless, I do recognize that a summary would just kill the point of even reading the work in the first place.
I too struggle with the focus thing. Seemed so easy when I was a kid I’d stay up reading all night until sunrise but the drudgery of day to day life and all its problems seeps into my brain overriding whatever I’m reading where I loop the same sentence over and over again without even realising.
Summaries won’t fix that but honestly not even sure what will. A reading group mayhaps could help set goals and discussion is always fun. Lemme know when you figure it out
I’m actually trying to train my attention span to get longer again but its tough business with all these phones and scrooling content about the place. Honestly might just make my router ethernet only and force myself off the internet entirely
You know at one point I tried to force myself into the headspace of doing what it took to become a game developer; I was ready to go to university AND still be a working man at the same time, or at least I was psyching myself into it; then I realized I hate having commitments and decided to just put it aside. Having goals and structure definitely makes things extremely more manageable for me (as I found out when I dove into NaNoWriMo); but…like, several years of university? Like…sure, I’d love to be a game developer but like…who’s got that kind of time and patience?
I also wanted to be a writer (got stories in my head I’d love to put to paper), but it takes skill to be a good writer, and it takes practice to hone those skills and like…that’s just too much effort.
The only two things that work for me is someone else setting expectations on me to do something or letting my hyperfixation demon guide me. The former is good but can’t really find anyone to do it and the later is well the demon only wants to play video games (completed 32 this year so far).
Alas brains be a silly thing.
I also wanted to be a game dev and a writer… Spooky.
My guilty secret is that I always check the SparkNotes summary of a chapter I just read to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I’d be surprised if an LLM could summarize chapter by chapter effectively without including information from other chapters. You could inject the entire chapter as context, but very few models have large enough context windows for that.
I’ll be real, if I find an academic paper that looks solid from the abstract, I’ll have ChatGPT summarize a coupler sections for me, and if it seems worth my time, I’ll commit to reading the whole thing. I think there’s too much moralizing around the issue, and if you can use it to help you, then you should
You joke but I’ve seriously considered at one point just having chatGPT summarize the novels I wanted to read chapter by chapter so I can still enjoy the story without sitting through hundreds of pages; as someone who considers himself a discerning reader, I also recognize I may as well just have a friend recount the story to me for all the literary value I’ll get out of it. It’s just I’ve lost the ability to focus, I find myself reading the same sentence multiple times to grasp what I just read, and I just can’t seem to maintain interest anymore.
I’ve considered it in the past, but I just can’t make that final leap to having AI just tell me what happens in a story.
Some stories though are a little too…accountant-y? I wanted to read the Baru Cormorant series (okay, that’s a lie; I wanted to listen to it on audible), but then at some point it sounded like it started talking about accounting and I zoned out immediately (early-ish on in the story too). Now there’s a series I feel sad to miss out on.
from someone with ADHD who, as well, flaked to sparknotes for in-class reading throughout high school, the greatest favor you can do for yourself is Not That At All Costs.
reading and similar prolonged focus tasks are, unfortunately, a muscle you have to train. what chatgpt will do will be equivalent of the plot summary on the back of the book but with spoilers, or just pure dry timelining. it’s deleterious to your general comprehension capacities and trains a helplessness instinct if you lean into it. it will have cascading effects on your critical thinking abilities.
if you have not tried audiobooks, try audiobooks. it’s a different neural pathway than reading, which might help, and its still fine for comprehension and critical thought.
I can definitely understand that so much of mental capabilities are a muscle you need to train; I used to love reading when I was growing up; the only other people I knew who loved reading as much as myself was one of my siblings (we didn’t share the same interests though), everyone I went to school with had zero interest in novels unfortunately. I recall spending hours and hours just engrossed in novels, a practice I can’t imagine doing now without forcing myself to continue. I lose interest in the stuff I’m doing (watching stuff, gaming, etc) very quickly, but I do recall when I used to read as a child I could just sit on my bed for hours on end just reading. I used to be able to finish books I liked in 1-2 days, but now I can barely remain interested for more than a handful of minutes at a time. I can’t help but feel there’s a muscle I let deteriorate that is now no longer up to the task.
Basically once content like video games, TV shows and anime became more accessible I ended up leaving reading behind; ironically aside from wanting to be a game developer ever since I was a kid, I also always had my heart set on being a writer (I still have a lot of fleshed out stories in my head I never wrote down), but I also left that behind ages ago. I just don’t have the focus or patience to do what it takes to be a good author (it takes skill to tell a story and to tell it well, and it takes practice to do that, I’m too lazy to practice).
If you want to get back into shape, as it were, try short stories. I’ve been reading Sherlock Holmes and they’re mostly only a few pages each and written for a mass market audience. Turn your brain on exactly as much as you need to either read an entertaining adventure or critically analyze the crime and try to solve it first
Very relatable. I think starting work killed my interest in reading. Only having a couple free hours every day curtails any lengthy reading sessions, and piecemeal stuff is too sporadic, like I can’t squeeze a half hour of fiction reading on a bus trip if I’m lucky to get a seat and then pick it up seamlessly on the commute back. Having the time to deep read and choose when to stop is critical to my enjoyment and understanding of written media.
I have adhd like WhyEssEff, and I struggle with focus while reading, especially after catching covid. And I agree with her that you should NOT USE CHATGPT TO SUBSTITUTE ACCESSIBILITY TOOLS. It will erode your mental capacity even further, there’s research about it.
While I have my own quirks and rituals to help me focus when reading, I have friends with higher support needs than mine, and they swear by audiobooks or other accessibility tools like text-to-speech or sequential readers that read one word at a time (if a wall of text is a sensory impediment for you). Some of them are open source or easily pirated, too.
Please put your accessibility needs to connect to the rich world of literature in the hands of people who understand our struggles and develop tools based on science, and not on Sam Altman’s bullshit machine that will inevitably remove the humanity of any piece of writing out into it.
Honestly my mental faculties are disconcertingly a lot less sharp than they used to be, and I’m not that old (I guess I’m middle aged at this point? Still feels like I’m young in my late thirties); admittedly the last thing I’d need is an AI tool making things infinitely worse. I need to try and use audible more; I own more than a few (good) books on them and should force myself to work on my declining focus.
I feel just about the same, and it’s been humbling realizing I now need to accommodate for myself if I want to have a relatively normal life, while before I just rawdogged adhd symptoms and still got stuff done. It’s never too young or too old to realize we need a bit of support. If someone with much more visible disability told me they’re too young to need their mobility tools, I would correctly recognize that as bs. Same difference with mental struggles.
Hope you don’t have to force yourself, just try different things other people have and see if they work.
The fun is imagining the world being described on the page not reading a bunch of bullet points telling you what happened.
Unfortunately not enough people are taught this I only really learned it cos my dad would read to me before bed every day and he’d get me books we’d read together so we could discuss plot. Without that I’d probably never have given books a chance
Honestly I’d hate to miss out on well written stories; some authors know how to use the written word to really bring their writing to life, and these books are an absolute pleasure to read. I got into reading I think because back in my day there really was nothing else to do; the only console I had was an MSX keyboard (awesome though it was) and I’d re-watched my favorite comedies on VHS a million times, so inevitably I got into reading (starting with horror and computer hacker stories, and then finding my way onto animorphs) and discovered I LOVED how deep literary characters were compared to characters on the screen. Today however I find it hard to stay focused, and I find my mind drifting to literally anything else or just going blank; but regardless, I do recognize that a summary would just kill the point of even reading the work in the first place.
I too struggle with the focus thing. Seemed so easy when I was a kid I’d stay up reading all night until sunrise but the drudgery of day to day life and all its problems seeps into my brain overriding whatever I’m reading where I loop the same sentence over and over again without even realising.
Summaries won’t fix that but honestly not even sure what will. A reading group mayhaps could help set goals and discussion is always fun. Lemme know when you figure it out
I’m actually trying to train my attention span to get longer again but its tough business with all these phones and scrooling content about the place. Honestly might just make my router ethernet only and force myself off the internet entirely
You know at one point I tried to force myself into the headspace of doing what it took to become a game developer; I was ready to go to university AND still be a working man at the same time, or at least I was psyching myself into it; then I realized I hate having commitments and decided to just put it aside. Having goals and structure definitely makes things extremely more manageable for me (as I found out when I dove into NaNoWriMo); but…like, several years of university? Like…sure, I’d love to be a game developer but like…who’s got that kind of time and patience?
I also wanted to be a writer (got stories in my head I’d love to put to paper), but it takes skill to be a good writer, and it takes practice to hone those skills and like…that’s just too much effort.
The only two things that work for me is someone else setting expectations on me to do something or letting my hyperfixation demon guide me. The former is good but can’t really find anyone to do it and the later is well the demon only wants to play video games (completed 32 this year so far).
Alas brains be a silly thing.
I also wanted to be a game dev and a writer… Spooky.
My guilty secret is that I always check the SparkNotes summary of a chapter I just read to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I’d be surprised if an LLM could summarize chapter by chapter effectively without including information from other chapters. You could inject the entire chapter as context, but very few models have large enough context windows for that.
If you want a plot summary they’re available online for free
I’ll be real, if I find an academic paper that looks solid from the abstract, I’ll have ChatGPT summarize a coupler sections for me, and if it seems worth my time, I’ll commit to reading the whole thing. I think there’s too much moralizing around the issue, and if you can use it to help you, then you should