Artificial Intelligence as an Amplifier of Reading and Writing

Faced with concerns that AI would “dehumanize” writing and reading, I propose a different perspective: what if these tools were catalysts to enrich our cultural practices rather than threats?

The Recurring Cycles of Technological Fear

Artificial intelligence frightens us, certainly, but this fear is part of a long tradition of distrust toward innovations that transform our cultural practices. It questions our anthropological place, and like any new technology, it is perceived as diabolical, and it’s yet another blow to a supposedly “brain-dead” youth. Yet this rhetoric of intellectual decline has been repeating for centuries. If we took literally all these alarming “scientific studies” about declining reading rates among young people, we should logically have reached negative reading rates long ago!

The reality is more nuanced. The very criteria of what constitutes “real” reading remain strangely rigid: a paper book would be noble, but the same text read on a screen wouldn’t count. This distinction deeply escapes me. A text remains a text, whether on paper, on screen, listened to, or shared. The modes of access change the relationship to content, certainly, but don’t alter its fundamental substance.

If we honestly observed the time spent reading today, including video subtitles, online comments, constant textual exchanges, I am convinced we would discover that people read more than before. The web itself, invented in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN to automate the processing of scientific data, revolutionized our access to knowledge through the invention of what he called hypertext (incidentally, HTTP, which we all know, stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol), which is our daily reality today. Hypertext links (the ability to click on a link in text to access another page) made us leave the linear book to navigate at the very heart of information, creating substantive relationships and enabling unprecedented discoveries. This “exit from the book” is not sacrilege but a blessing for cultural democracy.

Synthesis as Creative and Democratic Act

Why refuse, or judge, that artificial intelligences write, particularly syntheses? In the professional, academic, or personal world, who really has the time to synthesize thousands of documents to extract common trends? No one. Yet identifying commonalities, links, dialectics, is precisely what research does, whether in humanities or hard sciences. AI, with all its biases and imperfections that we must recognize and understand, offers us access to knowledge that would otherwise be inaccessible to us.

The argument that reading an entire book would always be superior to reading a summary deserves nuance. In my experience as an avid reader of essays, I find that many works could fit in ten pages if the thinking were better condensed. Commercial and institutional constraints, with academics having to publish to advance their careers, for example, sometimes produce, too often, padding and repetition. For these books, I sincerely prefer to have them synthesized, whether by the author, by other humans, or by artificial intelligence. I will have received “the substantive marrow,” and that was indeed the purpose of the book, to transmit ideas or concepts.

This same demand for density, I find it in all the conferences and public events I have organized for over thirty years. A well-prepared five-minute intervention often surpasses an improvised twenty-minute address, which lacks clarity, density and often contains unnecessary repetitions and digressions. Thus, I think that AI, so gifted at synthesis, can help us raise our level of expectations, to ask authors to work harder on their thinking, to make it denser and richer.

The Creative Otherness of the Machine

Artificial intelligence doesn’t “think” like us, and that’s precisely its strength. It brings us perspectives foreign to our usual modes of reasoning. The example of the game of Go is revealing: when AI AlphaGo beat champion Lee Sedol in 2016, it did so by inventing openings that humans had never imagined in millennia of practice. These strategies are now studied and used by human players. The machine hasn’t replaced human creativity, it has enriched it.

This otherness of AI reminds me of my itinerant film screenings. For fifteen years, I have been organizing screenings in the streets, projecting short films on city walls. One might think that these three-minute projections “debase” the cinema experience. The opposite occurs: the theater goes out into the street, sparks unpredictable encounters, restores to cinema its dimension as a shared image experience in public space. The two experiences feed each other, and itinerant projections rekindle desires for cinema.

Similarly, AI and human reading can coexist and enrich each other. Indeed, we may actually risk losing certain cognitive abilities if we systematically delegate reading to AI. But this warning shouldn’t make us forget the possibilities for mutual enrichment. The challenge is not to choose between one or the other, but to understand how to articulate them intelligently.

Toward Renewed Expectations

The fact that AIs write, particularly syntheses, democratizes access to knowledge for those who have neither the time nor the desire to read entire works. It’s their right, and this increased accessibility can only create more intellectual and cultural connections. AI syntheses inspire reading, just as my street projections inspire cinema-going.

But be careful: I’m not advocating an abandonment of our critical faculties. On the contrary, AI requires us to sharpen them. If machines excel at synthesis, we must, as authors, work differently, dig into our human specificities: empathy, lived experience, the ability to create meaning beyond the simple compilation of information. The question is not whether AI will transform our professions—it already does—but how to preserve, cultivate and reinvent our independence of thinking, creating, learning in this new context.

Artificial intelligence is not an ersatz human, it is something else. And like any otherness, if we take it as such rather than fearing or demonizing it, it is necessarily enriching. We are always afraid of the stranger, we always want to believe ourselves superior to those whose language or practices we don’t understand. This is the basis of racism, and it seems to me that we sometimes reproduce these patterns toward AI.

The gift that artificial intelligences give us is to push us even more toward ourselves, to explore what makes our human singularity. Not in sterile competition, but in creative complementarity where each, human and machine, brings its specific contribution to the enrichment of knowledge and culture.