Joshua Rothman on the effect AI is having on reading:
Artificial intelligence, in itself, is unmotivated; it reads, but is not a reader; its “interests,” at any given time, depend fundamentally on the questions it’s asked. And so its usefulness as a reading tool depends on the existence of a culture of reading which it can’t embody or perpetuate.
Indeed, a culture that AI is helping to eradicate, or at least change beyond recognition, as Rothman himself predicts:
Suppose we’re headed toward a future in which text is seen as fluid, fungible, refractable, abstractable. In this future, people will often read by asking for a text to be made shorter and more to-the-point, or to be changed into something different, like a podcast or multi-text report. It will be easy to get the gist of a piece of writing, to feel as if you know it, and so any decision to encounter the text itself will involve a positive acceptance of work... Perhaps new stylistic approaches will aim to repel automated reading, establishing zones of reading for humans only. The people who actually read “originals” will be rare, and they’ll have insights others lack, and enjoy experiences others forgo—but the era in which being “well-read” is a proxy for being educated or intelligent will largely be over.
Although maybe we’re already there. In class the other day I was talking to an articulate teenager who expressed more curiosity about her own country than her high school’s sanitised history curriculum was able to satisfy. But when I told her I could suggest a few books to fill in the gap, she visibly recoiled. That word. Books. Ugh.
PS: Gary Shteyngart foresaw that ugh, more than a decade ago.
PPS: Composers are doomed as well, it seems.
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