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.

Are you really comparing the energy necessary to read something to taking a photo and having an ai read it for you. You are not comparing zero energy to some energy, you are comparing a whole lot of energy to some energy.