Any AI app worth its salt allows you to upload a photo of something and it processes it flawlessly in the same amount of time. This is absolutely worthless teather.

It’s not the time that’s the friction. It’s the choice. The student has to actively take the picture and upload it. It’s a choice. It takes more effort than reading the autogenerated summary that Google Drive or Copilot helpfully made for the digital PDF of the reading they replaced.

It’s not much more effort. The level of friction is minimal. But we’re talking about the activation energy of students (in an undergrad English class, likely teenagers). It doesn’t take much to swing the percentage of students who do the reading.

The quotas for summarising text and parsing images and then summarising text aren't the same. As you surely know.