As we enter 2025, the AI boom is pushing forward at an unprecedented pace, with no signs of stopping. Over the past couple of years, there’s been a desire to make AI part of nearly every field, from scientific research to the arts. While AI is nascent and still finding its place, it seems everywhere—even in places it arguably doesn’t belong.
Perhaps the most discussed area is the arts, visual art, music, or writing. But there are some other, more eye-opening tasks being given to AI that I never could have predicted.
In the past, I’ve looked at the danger of chatbots, something a person typically must seek out to interact with. However, Meta recently came under fire for having several AI accounts (“managed by humans”) on Instagram that they themselves created. While many companies have historically struggled to remove bots from their platforms, Meta seems to want to encourage it. The cited reasoning is to drive engagement and make the platform entertaining. Not only that, but Meta has also reportedly created a tool that allows users to talk with and answer questions from their users via an AI chatbot.
I recently stumbled upon several new apps that seem to be AI reading assistants. These apps can take in a book, summarize the information, story, and themes, and then spit it back out in a shorter read without the user needing to look at the original text. While using AI to summarize a tedious academic article may appeal to some, people also use these apps to summarize fiction and nonfiction books. As a novelist who painstakingly takes months to write a work, I find the idea that an AI bot is digesting it and regurgitating a cheat sheet disconcerting.
I realize summarizing content isn’t new— After all, SparkNotes has been around for many years. However, there are some key differences between AI and SparkNotes. People aren’t just using these apps for required reading in an academic setting where you typically need summaries or learning aids. SparkNotes is meant to be used as a learning tool and, perhaps most importantly, was developed by people who read the original text and could understand the context of all those themes and key ideas. If you’re not engaging with the original text, it can profoundly affect your ability to think critically.
I find the popularity of these apps somewhat surprising because reading is a widespread hobby that people enjoy.
AI will likely settle into the cracks of our lives in the long run, just as the computer and, more recently, the smartphone have done. But right now, it all seems to be one big, frantic experiment to see where AI fits. And while I’ve been critical, not all its applications are harmful. Some have even been around for years, such as using AI in forensics. Over the coming years, it will shake out, and I hope it will find where it has a place and where it doesn’t. A result I trust will be sooner rather than later.
To me, all of this begs the question: Why? What is the point, ultimately? If you’re on social media, isn’t part of the fun to check in with your friends, followers, and those you follow? To share your own life? When reading, isn’t connecting with the text and reflecting on it more engaging with yourself or those around you? Sitting with a book and leisurely reading is a wonderful way to find moments of solace when your imagination can run free. I find it sad that a bot may now become an intermediary.