Tech Bros Puzzled by Why AI Hasn’t “Massively Disrupted” Books Yet

AI enthusiasts on Reddit and X are questioning why large language models have not yet disrupted book publishing or education, despite their advanced text generation capabilities. Commenters attribute the lack of disruption to limitations like "context rot," where AI models lose coherence over longer outputs, and the technology's tendency to produce a mix of fact and fiction, which undermines its effectiveness in learning. The gap between AI hype and reality is becoming increasingly apparent as these use cases fail to materialize.

A lot of people still seem convinced that AI will replace every job on Earth, despite the fact that the tech still struggle with simple math https://dev.to/maximsaplin/llms-are-bad-at-math-5h4d . As the AI hype wears increasingly thin, that gap between hype and reality is becoming impossible to ignore. The large language models making up the world’s favorite chatbots might be powerful compared to the predictive text algorithms that came before them, but they’re far from the epoch-defining super intelligence many have assumed is right around the corner. In one since-deleted thread https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search?fun=ids&ids=t3 1uq0hoq posted on the Reddit forum r/singularity, an AI aficionado posed what they clearly thought was a brilliant question: “why hasn’t AI text generation massively disrupted books yet, when it’s technically capable?” “Language and writing are the strongest abilities of LLMs, since they’re LLMs,” the user continued. “And yet, people are still reading human made books. Why is that?” “Just ask the LLM to write you the sequel to your favorite H arry P otter novel, and it will,” they enthused. The answer, as some pointed out in the comments, has to do with LLMs’ lack of an ability to concentrate. As the length of an AI chatbot’s response grows, so too does its inability to keep everything cohesive, a debilitating limitation https://www.understandingai.org/p/context-rot-the-emerging-challenge known as “context rot.” Context rot is why you never see individual AI-generated video clips longer than a few seconds, or full-length https://futurism.com/fantasy-novel-ai-prompt-copy-style books https://futurism.com/future-society/south-korea-ai-textbook that humans actually want to read. Books aren’t the only thing tech optimists expected AI to devour. In a separate post on X-formerly-Twitter https://x.com/ryanbrewer/status/2073812031988535760 , OpenAI staffer Ryan Brewer expressed frustration that AI “didn’t create an educational renaissance.” “Shouldn’t I be able to learn a language in a month?” Brewer asked in a post that quickly earned over 2.1 million views. “What did we get wrong?” The reality, of course, is that attempts to integrate AI into education have been consistently disastrous https://futurism.com/future-society/south-korea-ai-textbook . As it turns out, a technology that spits out a confident mixture of fact and fiction without challenging the user to track down or digest information on their own isn’t conducive to particularly effective schooling. “It’s so f king depressing that so many people think this is how learning works,” one user https://x.com/askforcawmbyok/status/2074114677349519823 quipped. Another simply shared a screenshot https://x.com/RadishHarmers/status/2074454663479357748 of an AI chatbot’s textbox containing the prompt: “learn for me.” More on AI: Workplaces Have Gotten So Bizarre That People Are Just Sending AI Slop Back and Forth at Each Other https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/workplaces-bizarre-ai-back-and-forth