AI Summaries Are Making You Worse at Reading
Dr Sam Illingworth
AI summaries often remove the important doubts and questions authors include, making readers understand less deeply. This shallow reading harms critical thinking and leads to accepting simplified conclusions without context. A simple, 15-minute reading method can help recover true understanding by focusing on the original text’s hedging and questions.
6 Aug 2026
I have spent almost two decades reading academic papers and policy documents. The skill that matters most is not speed. It is knowing where the author hid the honest part.
AI summaries delete it every time.
When AI removes the effort of gathering and synthesising sources, the mental work that cements understanding never happens.
What deep reading actually does
Maryanne Wolf has been studying this for a decade. In Reader, Come Home, she documents the cognitive processes that deep reading activates: connecting new information with background knowledge, forming analogies, building the basis for inference and deduction.
Deep reading fosters empathy, imagination, critical thinking, and self-reflection.