This week, I hosted an AI reading training with a friend. It was great, and I learned a lot. From “asking” the book questions directly to exploring an author’s larger body of work to finding out which other ideas are relevant that connect to it, AI can broaden your perspective on reading a lot.
Still, today, I ended up sitting on my terrace for three hours, flipping through a book I’d already read. Page by page, highlight by highlight I went. I took ten pages of notes by hand. I didn’t do anything else. Just read and wrote. When I got pulled into minor distractions once or twice, I soon returned to the task. It was three hours of pure absorption.
What if I had uploaded the book into an AI and spent three hours chatting with it? I don’t know. I’ll have to try that sometime. But I doubt it’d leave me as fulfilled. Inspired. Proud. And instead of the ideas of the original book sinking in, I’d probably have 50 new ones I’d first have to wrap my head around. Could the AI have suggested a practical implementation plan for the book? Probably. But that, too, was already in the book. And I didn’t need implementation. I needed impression. I wanted to impress the author’s thoughts onto my mind and soul. Chatting with a bot for three hours does not seem like an efficient, let alone attractive, way of doing that—at least to me.
With every request you send, AI keeps digging. It prompts you to prompt it back. “Would you like me to structure this more? Would you like some practical suggestions?” Every output asks for more input. AI wants to play ping-pong, but what if I want to be a sponge? When you write something down by hand, you write it into your brain. When you read AI output, you’re scanning in the same, distracted, haphazard way you’re reading anything when it first lands on your virtual desk. You look for headlines, bolded lines, and the next jumping off point. You’re both digging—ever more holes, hoping to strike gold. But digging is not how you internalize. It’s how you find. But what if you’ve already found what you were looking for? What if you’re already holding the gold in your hands?
Most sources of information are only worthy of a skim, if that. Some serve as meaningful stepping stones. But once you’ve found a treasure trove, stop digging. Start absorbing. Take the time to focus, go deeper, and impress the ideas onto your self.
There are some things AI can help us do that we never could do before. Equally, however, there are some things AI will never be able to do. Both are worth assessing and remembering.
