Stamina

On books, AI, and shortcuts

When I’m feeling a certain way about things, I read books. I read a lot of books so I’m often feeling a certain way about things. I’m not totally sure what this is about. Perhaps I’m searching, all the time, for the answer to an unstated question. I will even forego sleep, my favorite thing, when I get locked in to a book. My mind will take hold of a thread and refuse to let go, and I must reach the end to feel resolution, even if it’s fleeting.

I’ve made much fuss in Soft Coded about reading for reading’s sake. I maintain my position and want to add something to it. I was talking to a friend today about “model writing” as a job, whether it’s worth pursuing, whether it’s the only future job for writers (and whether that means we’re ahead of the game by doing it), whether AI destroys all semblance of writing as a human endeavor, etc. etc. This wasn’t a revolutionary conversation, just a temperature check between two curmudgeons, but it was on the heels of me staying up all night to start and finish a whole book (fittingly, Acts of Desperation), so I’ve been thinking tired thoughts about it.

Under-Over

More than the future of writing, I worry about the future of reading. Even the AI itself hates to read. It’s not its first instinct to go do research, to go down a rabbit hole, to be curious, to embrace longform. You have to instruct it, remind it, practically beg it, to do these things rather than rest on it’s pre-knowledge-cutoff laurels. And how can we trust a thing like that to really be superintelligent? I get that AI has been trained on basically the entire corpus of the written word, but the way it behaves, it doesn’t seem like it. It behaves as if it possesses everything ever written, not that it put forth the stamina to know anything.

I assumed for awhile that my irritation with the AI reciting what it remembers in that perfectly warm, confident tone, the one that makes me want to throw the laptop across the room, was my own beef. But as always, there is a benchmark for this! LiveBrowseComp set out to test whether search agents are actually searching or just verifying what they already believe. Agents answered up to 44.5% of the questions without using tools at all. This failure is called “under-search” and it’s disturbingly familiar to someone like me, instructing the model to shape up in this regard, to little effect.

Then there’s long-context training, which, my gosh. This is an industry holy grail, getting the AI to hold onto a reasonable amount of context for a reasonable amount of time. Here, the RULER benchmark found that most long-context models don't hold up anywhere near advertised, and that one of the characteristic ways they fail is by reverting to parametric knowledge. Which is to say, the model, handed a hundred pages, loses the thread somewhere in the middle and sneakily reverts to what it thought before you gave it anything to read.

There’s also tool overuse, whereby models retrieve constantly and pointlessly, running searches for info they already have, burning latency and inviting bad sources. One paper calls this a knowledge epistemic illusion, the model systematically underestimating what it holds. So the thing over-reads and under-reads. The model has no functioning sense of where its own knowing stops. It can’t feel the edge, which means it can’t tell the difference between pondering something and looking it up, and it defaults to whichever behavior its training rewards. In technical terms this is a knowledge boundary.

You may be thinking, I sympathize! I also have a knowledge boundary that goes both ways! Yes, but you’re a person. These models are allegedly better, faster, stronger than us, approaching “artificial general intelligence,” and should be able to stay even a little bit focused. The fact that they’re taking shortcuts, same as people, is a bummer. The future of writing is sort of beside the point if no one is reading said writing, not even the AI.

Cover to Cover

Reading for pleasure has been on the decline longer than AI has been around. I can’t blame it for everything. The American Time Use Survey (news to me too) tells us that fewer people are reading overall, yet the people who do still read are reading slightly more than readers did two decades ago, about an hour and thirty-seven minutes a day. So the room is shrinking but the remaining occupants are committed. This tracks with my experience in 2026. I am building walls of books in my home hoping that they’ll physically, literally protect me from brain atrophy, that if I just keep reading, I’ll be okay. This sounds insane but, I’ll have you know, is highly rational.

I can blame AI for killing the last practical reason to finish anything. All this hyper-summarization is an issue, not necessarily writing itself. Summarization is sold as pure gain, all signal, when actually it’s severing comprehension from duration. You must put in the hours (or the 1hr and 37min). Professors have been describing this for a couple of years now as a stamina problem more than comprehension, students who can parse a difficult paragraph but cannot will not hold attention across three hundred pages. Skimming is an important skill, yes, but was never meant to be the whole point. Someone who has actually read rather than scanned (or stolen 👀) books whole is, to me, a trustworthy person, and I feel strongly about this even though it’s an imperfect heuristic. There are obviously well-read monsters out there.

I think it’s that reading is somewhat submissive. For however many hours, you agree to be subordinate to somebody else’s sequence, to receive the argument in the order they built it, to sit through it. The whole activity is structured around tolerating not knowing for a sustained period on the promise of a resolution you have no guarantee is coming, the same tolerance a person needs to change their mind.

AI doesn’t change its mind ever, not really. Because it’s not well-read. It arrives at everything simultaneously and holds it all in equal regard, its positions cost it nothing. Whereas that stubbornness I felt last night, the refusal to let go of this book until I finished it, felt like an expense, and I mean that as praise.