In high school, a teacher gave me a copy of "How To Read Better And Faster" which teaches you speed reading. This came in very handy in college.

I find that when I try to speed read modern human writing, there are often errors (like missing or misused words) or awkward expressions that I do have to slow down and think harder a lot to really parse it.

With AI writing, it's sort of self redundant and the information density of each sentence seems to have more even information density. This makes it very easy to do a very high level speed read and get the full gist.

There are also what I'm assuming are bots on hugging face (or maybe non-native english speakers who are using ai for translation) that interact with me where I have no idea what they are saying until I read it very slowly.

The density argument is very interesting.

Does speed reading help you process the final message faster if it's written by AI compared to people?

Because if you read 1 information dense sentence, 1 medium dense, and 1 sparse sentece written by a human, it's still way less text in total than 6 information sparse sentences written by AI... even if it's all over the place when it comes to density or style.

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The density argument is really interesting.

Does speed reading actually help you process the final message faster when it’s AI-generated compared to human-written?

For example, if a human writes 3 sentences—one information-dense, one medium-density, and one sparse—that’s still much less text overall than 6 relatively sparse sentences written by AI.

Even if the AI output varies a lot in information density and writing style, you still have to process all that additional text. So I’m wondering whether speed reading actually offsets the verbosity of AI-generated responses, or whether the total amount of text is still the bigger factor.

That's interesting. You're saying speed reading helps you grasp information density of text?

As someone who hasn't practiced speed reading, how does that happen? Is it something about the way your brain tries to connect ideas from different parts of the text? Or the redundancy making the signal more stable?