Once I realised that quite a few people not only don’t enjoy reading or writing, many actually resent it and consider one, the other, or both to be the biggest chore at work, a lot of things clicked into place about both generative models and how people read
@baldur I think that’s extremely true AND a mode that is increasing quite rapidly. The switch away from literacy as the gateway to most things that are fun to do in downtime has observably reduced the percentage of people who reach adulthood as genuinely fluent readers and especially writers—and most people weren’t comfortable, confident writers 50 years ago, either.
@baldur The greatest successes of generative models have been on text that nobody wants to write and nobody wants to read: spam, and lobbying letters to politicians.
@baldur this seems to me similar to the extrovert/introvert divide. extroverts for some reason tend to feel better about getting information from talking or listening to other people.
there's also a sociopath bias; a lot of sociopathic persuasion strategies only work in person, not in writing (and leadership positions tend to attract sociopaths, who then project their values onto their org)
@slothrop Ah, sorry, I should have been clearer. I'm not talking about difficulty.
You can find reading or writing difficult but still find it enjoyable. I hadn't realised that there were a lot of people who have no problems with either but just dislike the activity
@Elizabeth3@baldur Ah, but Google's AI can watch videos for you and write a short summary so you don't even need to look at all the work someone put into making the video!
(I much prefer reading to video and deeply resented the pivot of so much useful content to video, but even I think that's a bleak, exploitative move.)
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