Yesterday’s post reminds me of an article I recently read via The Conversation, titled “AI is making reading books feel obsolete – and students have a lot to lose”. Basically, the author wrote a book to discuss “the pros and cons of letting AI do the reading for you”. There are many interesting statistics, facts and research findings in the article, which make it a valuable read.
But I simply cannot agree with the author’s suggestion that AI is likely to make reading books obsolete. While people read for many different reasons – summarised by the author as “reading for pleasure, stress reduction, learning and personal development” – those who truly enjoy reading will never let AI take away the fun. True, the article’s second last paragraph touches upon “what makes reading enjoyable – encountering a moving piece of dialogue, relishing a turn of phrase, connecting with a character”, but any lover of books would tell you they get far more pleasure than this from a good read. Not just pleasure, but MEANINGFUL pleasure.
Perhaps this sentence reveals the true focus of the article: “Cognitive skills are the only thing at stake when we rely too heavily on AI to do our reading work for us.” What “reading work”?
To me, it goes back to reading as a privilege, not a task and never a chore that one will be tempted to let AI do it on their behalf. Reading has nothing to do with research goals or examination results or productivity or efficiency or effectiveness or even convenience. We read because we want to, not because we have to. We also read stories, not data. AI is truly useful in many things, but not in reading, and certainly not in reading for us, because it has no idea what it is actually reading. AI can do work, but not reading.
(Image credit: “Why is reading for pleasure important?” via World Book Night, https://worldbooknight.org/impact/why-is-reading-for-pleasure-important)
(Day 83 #WarmWinterRead #WWR25 via @librarieschangelives)
Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 