On large language models and the big love of books
“I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am.”
How things have changed in the world of reading and writing and books since Walter Benjamin wrote those words back in 1931. Today, I’m unpacking my own library. How things have changed even in the few short years since I originally consigned its contents to the storage facility down the road.
Now, I mostly read from an app on my phone. Or listen to an audiobook as I’m doing the household chores. If it’s a research paper or lengthy report, I get Google Notebook LM to summarise the contents for me, either as a briefing note, a mind map or an AI-generated podcast with two chatty hosts. Unboxing these exquisite hardcover volumes has acquired the romance of unpacking artefacts from some archaeological dig. They are familiar yet foreign.
As for my own writing, I research by uploading multiple PDFs to NotebookLM and use Perplexity Pro to research a topic for me online – all its answers have citations and links to sources and so can be checked for accuracy or veracity as needed.
One thing I won’t do is use ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or any of those shiny, miraculous new tools the wordsmith has at her or his disposal to write for me. Yes, I write for money – for as Samuel Johnson said, “Nobody but a blockhead would write except for money.”
But whether it’s a review, an essay, a short story, or a poem, I also write for pleasure. To hone my technical, rhetorical and critical thinking skills. To enhance my memory and my knowledge of the world and the beings I share with it. To enlarge my consciousness.
To outsource to AI any of the processes which make us human seems to me the height of folly. Here’s Meghan O’Rourke in the New York Times:
“Will the wide-scale adoption of AI produce a flatlining of thought, where there was once the electricity of creativity? It is a little bit too easy to imagine that in a world of outsourced fluency, we might end up doing less and less by ourselves, while believing we’ve become more and more capable.
“What we stand to lose is not just a skill but a mode of being: the pleasure of invention, the felt life of the mind at work. I am a writer because I know of no art form or technology more capable than the book of expanding my sense of what it means to be alive.”
Read the full story at Seesaw.
