New Web Feature: The rise of ChatGPT and other AI text generators is poised to transform the written word—and everything from homework assignments to corporate communications. In "The Human Reader," Wheaton College English professor Richard Hughes Gibson explains that debates about whether statistically trained computers could reproduce human-sounding writing are nothing new. In the 1960s, novelist Italo Calvino imagined that writing was something machines could do. Reading, however, was something very different.
"While Calvino yields composition to the machines without a struggle, he clings tightly to reading. In fact, he argues that the rise of writing machines may even benefit reading, since now 'the decisive moment of literary life will be that of reading.' Why? Calvino's immediate answer is that reading is the site of 'unexpected meanings,' which he explains on loose psychoanalytic terms as the moment when 'a meaning that is not patent on the linguistic plane on which we were working' '[slips] in' from another, unconscious level. In layman's terms, Calvino is granting the reader the 'aha moment,' the flash of insight, the shock of disclosure, the instant of recollection (of something perhaps known to an earlier self or to past generations). Traditionally, this meaning has been the writer's charge; but Calvino argues that the electricity of literary discovery belongs equally to the reader. The writing machine's entrance clarifies the priority of human reading."
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Keep a civil tongue.