Letting an LLM summarize an article really does save time. But once the text gets compressed, its tone, rhythm, detail, and the feelings the author leaves half-hidden often get flattened too. When we read, we do not take in only conclusions or facts. Sometimes we also absorb the author's path of thought.

From the moment I realized models could summarize articles, I stopped reading many of them all the way through. If I came across something I wanted to read, I would paste in the link, ask for three or five bullet points, and call that "reading."

It was efficient. It did lighten the mental load. But over time I started to see the problem: once summarizing became my default, I kept the conclusion but lost the path that led to it. The flattened tone, the pacing, the emotions left unspoken, those were often the most alive parts of the piece.

That is not to say every article deserves a close reading. You can choose when to skim and when to slow down. Even selective reading is better than handing the whole thing to a model at once. Unless a piece is truly unreadable, I would rather not let an LLM summarize it for me anymore.