Long read: What’s Happening to Reading?

No, this isn’t yet another rant from us on the decline of reading. This is about the role of AI in our reading habits and what it means for writers as well. First, on the latter – with AI models ‘reading’ everything that’s out there to synthesize an output for a user, writers such as Tyler Cowen are bearing in mind that their readership includes AI models: “It was now reasonable to assume, he suggested, that everything he published was being “read” not just by people but also by A.I. systems—and he’d come to regard this second kind of readership as important.

…large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, are, among other things, reading machines. It’s not exactly right to say that they “read,” in the human sense: an L.L.M. can’t be moved by what it reads, because it has no emotions, and its heart can’t race in suspense. But it’s also undeniable that there are aspects of reading at which A.I.s excel at a superhuman level. During its training, an L.L.M. will “read” and “understand” an unimaginably large quantity of text. Later, it will be able to recall the substance of that text instantaneously (if not always perfectly), and to draw connections, make comparisons, and extract insights, which it can bring to bear on new pieces of text, on which it hasn’t been trained, at outrageous speed. The systems are like college graduates who, while they were at school, literally did all the reading. And they can read more, if you give them assignments.”

But more importantly, how do readers use AI: “…A.I. has readerly strengths that lie precisely in its impersonality. On David Perell’s “How I Write” podcast, Cowen explains that, as he reads, he peppers a chatbot with questions about whatever he doesn’t understand; the A.I. never tires of such questions and, in answering them, draws on a range of knowledge that no human being could access so quickly. This turns any text into a kind of springboard or syllabus.

A.I. can also simplify: if you’re struggling with the opening of “Bleak House,” you can ask for it to be rewritten using easier, more modern English. “Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy,” Dickens wrote. Claude takes a more direct path: “Gas lamps glow dimly through the fog at various spots throughout the streets, much like how the sun might appear to farmers working in misty fields.””

The more likely usage will also be summaries: “A.I. can generate abridgments, summaries, and other condensed editions on demand, we may even switch between versions as circumstances dictate—the way that, today, you might decide to listen to a podcast at “2x” speed, or quit a boring TV show and turn to Wikipedia to find out how it ended. Pop songs often come in different edits—the clean edit, and various E.D.M. remixes. As a writer, I may not want to see my text refracted in this way. But the power of refraction won’t be mine to control; it will lie with readers and their A.I.s. Together, they will collapse the space between reading and editing.”

This might not be a bad thing: “It’s certainly possible to imagine that intelligent reading machines will help us find value in texts that would otherwise go unread. (The process could be a little like fossil-fuel extraction: old, specialized, or difficult writing could be utilized, in condensed form, to power new thinking.) And there could also be scenarios in which L.L.M.s extend and deepen our reading memories. If I’d studied for my exams with an A.I. by my side, and then kept discussing my reading with that same A.I. year after year, I might build something like a living commonplace book, a thinking diary.”

Except, you are unlikely to have a humane relationship with AI: “As it happens, however, I’ve been blessed with a human conversational partner—my wife, who was in my graduate program, too. Our relationship has been shaped by our 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.”

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