Reading as a battle rather than collaboration

I am reading – and enjoying – Baldur Bjarnason’s The Intelligence Illusion, mainly because I was asked at work to “look into” how we could use AI.

I do have thoughts on this, but allow me them: I did quite a lot of work on what was even then known as artificial intelligence when I studied philosophy of the mind at university. I’ve also written and read a lot of interactive fiction, which essentially deals in generating fluent text from a user’s more or less natural language prompts. Sound familiar?

Anyway, Baldur writes:

Reading is an indirect collaboration with the author, mediated through the writing.

…and my younger, more philosophical self reckoned a better word for “collaboration” would be “battle”. But that’s not right. It’s more a wary… what? Exploration? Process of recognising a world? Creation?