GPT-3 has consumed a decent share of headlines recently. This AI language tool can distill large amounts of information and generate impressive pieces of writing. It has certainly made professors, writers, and editors nervous: If this chatbot can synthesize information and string words together persuasively, will there be a future for human writers?
Moreover, what will become of us readers as more and more of the text we encounter is AI-made? Words shape how we see everything. There’s something unsettling about the fact that AI could compose compelling essays. Will AI-authored text shape our beliefs about politics, culture, or religion? Ultimately, it’s not clear what role AI-generated language will play in the future. But I imagine GPT-3 is here to stay. So as language becomes more and more automated, how can human beings ensure that they remain the stewards of words?
One way we can begin to safeguard words is to spend more time reading (human-written) books, especially classics. By exploring the significance of being human, great books serve as a meeting ground for people to commune across time and geography. That’s why they defy racial, cultural, and temporal boundaries. As a friend recently told me, NBA star Dwyane Wade loves Jane Austen; American prisoners read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The examples go on. AI-generated text lacks this grounding human experience, so it simply could never substitute classic books.
The space between Christmas and the new year is the ideal time to rediscover the importance of books in our lives. This season provides stretches of quietude unavailable at any other time of year, which means we can acquire or reacquire a book-reading habit. As work, school, and other obligations pause this season, we can power off phones and pick up a book we’ve always wanted to read.
Christmas book reading can become a family tradition, too. I recently learned in The Girls Guide to D.C. newsletter about an Icelandic holiday tradition called Jolabokaflod, which means “Yule book flood.” Each year, as Christmas approaches, new books are released, and Icelanders buy them for one another as gifts, then spend Christmas reading. The more of a shared norm reading is, the more it can become a regular habit for people.
Unfortunately, book reading is in decline: Today, people on average read two to three fewer books than they did even just six years ago. I suspect that the frenzy of modern work, family life, and especially smartphone addiction all play a role in this decline. Since the advent of the iPhone, even the most dedicated bookworms admit that their reading habits have atrophied.
Some might argue that books aren’t worthwhile and so it doesn’t matter that people read them less. Perhaps books are merely cultural artifacts that digital media have supplanted. If reading is about acquiring useful information, then it doesn’t actually matter whether a person or a bot wrote something; what matters is efficient task completion. Or maybe books take up too much space to make a point that could have been made in much fewer words. (This, ironically, is Sam Bankman-Fried’s opinion.)
But this view misses a deeper reality that books suggest to us. Books, at least good ones, aren’t just thousands of needless and time-wasting words thrown together. They signify that some things are worthy of sustained attention. Certain stories, ideas, histories, and arguments need to linger in our thoughts over the course of a few hundred pages before we can even begin to grasp them. George Eliot couldn’t have captured the breathtaking heroism of ordinary people if Middlemarch were a 500-word blog post.
This points to the final reason that reading books is especially conducive to the Christmas season. As suggested above, there are some things whose meaning simply doesn’t yield to cursory glances or sound bites. The idea of God being born of a virgin is certainly one of those. So if you find time to read a book this Christmas season, perhaps you can recall that some mysteries, like some books, are so profound that they’re worth contemplating every year, over and over again.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Elayne Allen is the managing editor of Public Discourse.
