🤖 Who needs books, anyway?
Rewriting The Ethicist's response to an angry book club member
Reminder: Paid subscriptions are now just $5/month ($4 if you upgrade to annual billing), less than a New York City donut! If you upgrade in July, you can access special bonuses for each tier, including: a sparkly Doh pin, the first-ever live group AMA in August, a private 1:1 question-and-answer via voice memo, and two signed copies of Free Time. Read the full announcement for details:
After six months of lurking in my friend Terri’s writing community, New Rules Studio, I finally read aloud for the first time. What a relief! Many thanks to Christina Dexter for the expert facilitation, encouragement, and a fantastic prompt—this week she asked us to react to the following New York Times’ Ethicist column submission:
Re: A Woman in My Book Club Never Reads the Books. Can I Expose Her?
She reads reviews online and passes off the opinions as her own.
Dear Ethicist, I am a member of a lovely, well-established book group of very thoughtful, well-read women. Recently, I’ve become aware that one woman, whom I see socially outside the group, often doesn’t read the books, but instead relies on reading online reviews for a perspective about them. She then speaks with great authority at the meetings, as though those are her personal opinions, without crediting the source and without admitting that she didn’t read the book. In the days before a meeting, she will casually share with me that she “couldn’t get into it,” but she never says so to the other members. I sit there steaming but don’t reveal her duplicity. What would you do? —Name Withheld
Columnist Kwame Anthony Appiah’s reply »
✍️ An Alternate Response
Dear Name Withheld,
I appreciate your question, but you are asking the wrong one. The question isn’t whether you should expose your friend, but rather, why not follow her example?
Why should any of us read books anymore? The high school and college kids aren’t, as they are now increasingly relying on AI for their reading and writing.1 Sometimes, in return, the professors also “read” and grade those essays with AI. Why shouldn’t they? Who wants to read insta-slop, after all?
Books will become extinct soon, as we’ve been speculating for years, and as your astute book club member already surmises. She doesn’t need them—who does? The goal of a book club is to sound smart, after all, ideally to be the smartest one in the room. Not wise, and certainly not to be moved by an authentic experience of reading another person’s soulful artifact. The goal of a book club isn’t to inquire and connect; it’s to dominate and win.2
Just ask Meta, who recently ran a commercial where the family goldfish dies, due to neglect, and the father asks AI where he can get a new one . . . again. As Ismail Muhammad pointed out in a column for this very publication:
“I suppose Meta is meant to be saving the child, and therefore the father, from unhappiness, but what it actually seems to be doing is sparing them any feelings that might lend meaning to their lives.”
Feelings schmeelings. Books, once the records of our lives, are now obstacles—don’t you see? They merely kill time and trees. Maybe your friend has the right idea: why assign books to group if no one will read them anyway?
Why should authors write books if they can’t extract a living from them any longer? Wait, I take that back: we do need authors to keep writing them, for free, of course, as the AI overlords are hungry and they need more training. The LLMs have no problem plagiarizing books, so why should your friend? It’s only the Way of the New World.
It’s like the old saw about the man, the dog, and the machine. Why do you need the man? So he can feed the dog, who keeps him away from the machine.3
❤️
📰 Related reads referenced above:
New York Magazine, “Everyone is cheating their way through college”
New Yorker, “What happens after A.I. Destroys College Writing?”
The New York Times, “Why Does Every Commercial for A.I. Think You’re a Moron?”
🎬 The video at the end of the post is a must-watch from The Dor Brothers, an incredibly talented team whose AI-made (yet highly creative) videos continue to amaze and horrify 😱
📚 In all seriousness, is anyone else a member of Book of the Month? I joined earlier this year and always look forward to a new box, skipping when I don’t resonate with the picks. It celebrates 100 years next year! For more on its history, check out Amy Blair’s Tasting and Testing Books: Good Housekeeping, Popular Modernism, and Middlebrow Reading.
