Adriana E. Ramírez: AI, the end of thinking, reading, the source of thought

This Mother’s Day, after my family inquired what I wanted as a gift, I requested a book. A few hours later, a friend of mine, firmly a Gen Zer and fifteen years my junior, asked how I was celebrating the holiday.

“You know,” she texted me when I told her, “that you can just ask ChatGPT for a summary of the book, right? You don’t have to read it.” She knows that I’m a book critic, and wanted me to avoid “doing work for fun.”

The problem, I explained, is that the summary doesn’t give me what I want. I want to slowly fall into a book and then immediately discuss it with a friend — I want to think about it out loud. That’s why my husband and I are in a book club for two right now, taking turns reading 40 pages at a time of a novel, discussing our thoughts on what is happening.

“No offense,” my Gen Z friend wrote after I described our book club, “but that sounds like a college English class. Not like a date or whatever. You read books to escape, not to Think Deeply.”

The modern man

My friend has asked me not to use her name, because she’s worried people on the internet will call her dumb. But she has given me permission to use her texts, on two conditions: I am to tell you that she does in fact read books, and she requests that I “ask the readers to consider — TRUTHFULLY — do they think aloud about books with their friends?”

In her opinion, people in her generation would rather watch someone else talk about a book on TikTok or on YouTube, than actually form a discussion group with other human beings. But I know that’s not actually true.

Here in Pittsburgh, literary events are constantly packed with folks of all ages, including Zoomers. My friends in Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago report similar stories. It’s not hard to find dozens of local-area book clubs on social media, from ones that meet in-person, hosted by libraries, to online ones that meet on their communication platform of choice.

My husband is in a book club with many of his high school friends, all Millennials, and all as happy to discuss their books as they are to let the conversation meander. The point of a book club is to socialize, to force one another to read, and to think out loud.

But I don’t want to dismiss my friend entirely. Because her observations tap into a very real concern about thinking and learning emerging in public discourse. New York Magazine is asking if students are “cheating their way through college.” The LA Times declares “I bet you did not write that,” in response to heightened use of Artificial Intelligence.

My blood is boiling, my brain I.B.M.

We aren’t supposed to do the slow work of thinking anymore — the ads for new A.I. assistants tout how little thought their services require. Life is now simply about knowing how to ask the right question. My friend’s innocent “you don’t have to read it,” implies “you don’t have to do it anymore.”

That, for many young people means “you never have to learn it in the first place,” and that escalates quickly into “you don’t even have to think.”

Just ask ChatGPT for a summary.

For many industries, A.I. will be extraordinary. But what will happen to a generation of students that have never written an essay from scratch — who have never toiled with a thesis statement, who cannot articulate their positions? A friend on social media pointed out that Millennials might be the last generation of plucky C students willing to demonstrate their ungrammatical constructions.

The college professors I know are fighting back, as best they can, using class time to administer technology-free writing prompts in blue books, where kids accustomed to keyboards are forced to grapple with their own unfamiliar and illegible handwriting.

The students resent this, my friends report. They don’t want to think. They want to hang out with their friends and be out there living. So they are coming out of universities with all the questions, but none of the ability to produce an answer once the wifi signal fades.

Help you with your problems

I have only used ChatGPT in hesitant, exploratory ways. I resent how much it steals from writers, how it casts doubt on em-dashes because professional writers over-use them, how it made something I consider a craft into a predictable chain of expressions, devoid of a real mind stumbling through an argument — the best part of an essay.

I asked for a book this Mother’s Day because I am a reader, someone who thoroughly enjoys the slow, messy deciphering another person’s meaning. I dog-ear my pages, underline my favorite lines in pencil and read several books at the same time.

I’ve never been one for the summary, I suppose. I love the process too much to give it up. Almost as much as I love getting to articulate my thoughts in good company. There’s something to be said for thinking out loud. For knowing how to think in the first place.

Adriana E. Ramírez’s previous column was “ Have you heard about John? ”.