Just shut up and read
It’s like the burning of the Library of Alexandria all over again—except this time, the arsonist is generative artificial intelligence (AI), and the entire criminal web of programmers and vendors and tech moguls who have built this entire architecture of specious knowledge that leads, not to insight and illumination, but to intellectual sloth.
My contempt for generative AI should be well-known to all those who kindly take the time to read this column every week, as is my love for books, ideas, and the written word.
Contrived, cynical, and peak capitalist
At a time of over-reliance on AI to summarize a book, an article, or an email thread under the guise of efficiency, we are losing the ability to read, to parse through words to decipher meaning, to understand nuance and complexity, to cultivate empathy, and to immerse ourselves in new worlds.
The word “artificial” itself, as used to describe this new form of “intelligence,” is as it is: contrived, cynical, and, yes, peak capitalist. For it would only be a capitalist like Sam Altman who would say—as he reportedly recently did—that parents could ask ChatGPT to create a podcast they could listen to every morning centered around their children’s activities.
Like, dude, why not just speak to your children and have a proper conversation with them?
The constant need for “artificial” intervention really perplexes and infuriates me. What is the point of becoming “smarter” and more efficient if in the end you become a sh*tty human devoid of community and authentic interpersonal contact?
The dumbing down of the world
And now here comes the tragic irony of a former English Lit major who co-runs another AI company, Anthropic. It’s the parent of the infamous AI assistant, Claude, which, at this very moment, is being trained to read millions of print books in an attempt to osmose all the knowledge in the world in the most violent way possible.
Anthropic has acquired all these books—old and new, precious and prosaic—in order to rip the spines off them and feed the pages to a scanner for conversion into digital files. Once scanned, the unbound original pages are simply discarded, lost forever to humankind—destructive scanning, as it’s called—so that Claude can simply digest them and spit out the summaries right back at you in case you can’t be bothered to read them on your screen.
The dumbing down of the world to the point that one day soon even water will no longer be free because it will be diverted to run all those AI data centers is hardly a tech breakthrough worth celebrating.
What is the point, tell me, of outsourcing knowledge, when it comes at the cost of destroying the environment and curtailing our access to those elements, those basic necessities, that keep us alive?
Knowledge is power
Historians record that when Julius Caesar sided with Cleopatra in 48BC during the civil war in Egypt and set fire to the fleet of her brother Ptolemy XIII, the Great Library of Alexandria was an unfortunate casualty of the siege.
Perhaps it was less a deliberate act of destruction and more of a military strategy. Plutarch himself said, upon visiting the ruins of Alexandria, “Caesar was forced to repel the danger by using fire, which spread from the dockyards and destroyed the Great Library.”
A man named Aphtonius described the Acropolis of Alexandria as such:
“On the inner side of the colonnade were built rooms, some [of] which served as bookstores and were open to those who devoted their life to the cause of learning. It was these study rooms that exalted the city to be the first in philosophy. Some other rooms were set up for the worship of the old gods.”
Knowledge is power, as we are all aware; and to learn is to open our eyes and minds to truths and possibilities and worlds beyond us. Books and libraries—the guardians of knowledge—have always been the target of those who wish to limit our access to power.
See the conservatives and their banned books, for instance. The tech moguls behind generative AI are no different.
Contrast that cavalier attitude with that of China’s. Love him or hate him, President Xi Jinping recently announced that the revival of reading was one of the key pillars in transforming the country—already a global tech leader—into a “cultural powerhouse” by 2035. He even quoted Mao, who had said that “one can go a day without eating, a day without sleeping, but not a day without reading.”
Perhaps Sam Altman and his ilk should just pick up a book and read. Old-school style. Perhaps they may discover the lost little human lurking beneath the veneer of corporate greed.
They–like books–may actually be worth saving.
