I didn't provide much context but, 1) I've had deep conversations with these friends for years based on long articles or videos, and 2) I recommend maybe one or two long form items per year and they used to always review them without, "TLDR?"

So my main concern here is that my experience may be a microcosm of the shallowing of discussions correlated with some people's increased use of AI. That worries me.

It's more of a meta point to me. I get that this series isn't landing for some people, yourself included, but the meta-observation is that given something of roughly equal substantiveness as before, these friends' motivations for long form content and discussion seem to have atrophied, perhaps largely due to the addition of the AI summary reality cipher to their lives.

Of course, correlation isn't causation. Maybe they both just got older and more lazy, but given their reliance on AI summaries in other debates happening recently, I'm worried.