05/07/2025
What do you read, and why? A few decades ago, these weren’t urgent questions. Reading was an unremarkable activity, essentially unchanged since the advent of the modern publishing industry, in the 19th century. But today, the nature of reading has shifted. Plenty of people still enjoy traditional books and publications, and there are even readers for whom the networked age has enabled a kind of hyper-literacy; for them, a smartphone is a library in their pocket. For others, however, the old-fashioned, ideal sort of reading—intense, extended, beginning-to-end encounters with carefully crafted texts—has become a thing of the past.
“Large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, are, among other things, reading machines,” Joshua Rothman writes. “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.” Rothman considers the future of reading, and how A.I. could transform our relationship to traditional texts: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/AIeVrc
