All is not well in the fourth estate.
On Tuesday, the publisher of Axios hit “post” on an article about how he basically uses AI to read for him now, instead of recruiting the moldering neurons in his brain.
“AI has become my reading buddy,” began Nicholas Johnston, who formerly served as the news site’s editor-in-chief.
According to Johnston, the tedious process of actually reading a book “makes it easy to lose the thread.” James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Last of the Mohicans,” for example, was “too dense” for “casual vacation reading.” So instead, he typed in a prompt.
“I’d like a guide as I read ‘The Last of the Mohicans’ who can help me understand what I’ve read and where the story is, without giving spoilers or getting ahead of my progress,” he asked the AI. “Can you do this, chapter by chapter?”
Johnston noted that the chatbot agreed that the book was a hard one to keep track of — seemingly unbothered, or unaware, that this was an obvious example of yet more AI sycophancy.
“The robot agreed,” he said. And voilà: he now had a “recap of what’s happened so far” which clarifies “anything confusing.”
Lots to unpack here. Is this a sign of early-onset AI psychosis and/or the specific flavor of AI obsession that bosses seem so prone to? Is the 1826 novel “The Last of the Mohicans” really that hard to read? And is this advice even original enough to warrant a whole article? Isn’t this exactly what AI users have been doing with the tech since it hit the mainstream? What’s new here?
Regardless, it opened Johnston up to a lot of mockery online.
“Axios writer: I melted my brain with AI. Not only can I no longer read, but I don’t even understand the purpose of reading anymore,” sneered one viral post on Bluesky. “Here’s how you can also do this.”
It was also met with some more thoughtful — but no less scathing — takedowns.
“This kind of ‘reading’ is a different thing from what a lot of us understand reading to be,” wrote Jane Rosenzweig, an author and former director of the Harvard College Writing Center. “It’s a kind of optimizing/conquering of a book rather than experiencing it. We’re seeing the same thing with AI and writing.”
“The Last of the Mohicans,” a book that’s often assigned in school, was a particularly bad example to choose. You could spend three seconds looking it up in Google and find that there are detailed study guides available for free, and be pretty confident that what it’s telling you is accurate — unlike the AI answers, which Johnston admits are sometimes wrong.
But he has a “pro tip”: you could just feed the entire book into your favorite chatbot instead “so it can be more accurate with its answers.”
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