AI Writing and the Collapse of a Literate Culture

AI Writing and the Collapse of a Literate Culture

January 22, 2026

About this episode

Marc Barnes and Andrew Willard Jones discuss the impact of AI on literature and the implications for a literate culture.

The book has long been the place of completed thought, able to incorporate previous work and advance new thought. That is going away. AI generation is polluting the discourse; leading to a state where all "new" publications are, in fact, summarized AI restatements of the previous state of the question. In this podcast, Marc Barnes and Andrew Willard Jones discuss the effects of AI on the the technology of the books, and how a literate culture persists.

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