{"slug": "reading-was-something-we-used-to-do-before-ai-came-along", "title": "Reading was something we used to do before AI came along", "summary": "A Harvard student used ChatGPT to translate Anthony Burgess's novel 'A Clockwork Orange' into easier language, highlighting a trend where even educated individuals are turning to AI tools to bypass traditional reading. The Atlantic reports that reading has become extraneous for some, with AI replacing the effort of engaging with complex texts.", "body_md": "## Reading was something we used to do before AI came along\n\n13 July 2026\n\nRose Horowitch, [writing for The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/?gift=uP40aMSD1nXws5OJJf7PNon2RgfL5TMR77HEOKk96eg&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share) (gift link):\n\nReading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel\n\nA Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.)\n\nI used to read a lot. But that was when for a couple of years I wasn’t doing too much writing here. Once blogging resumed, reading, or finding time to read, became more challenging.\n\nThere’s a correlation here. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Nothing to do with AI. One activity increases, the other decreases. There’s only so much time in the day, after all.\n\nIt’s a poor excuse not to read though. And then there are book bloggers, who need to read in order to blog meaningfully about what they say they’ve read.\n\nThe example of the Harvard (how can that be?) student who was struggling to read *A Clockwork Orange* is another matter though. I don’t know anything about the individual in question, but I suspect blogging wasn’t holding them back from reading.\n\nMaybe they simply didn’t like the novel, even if it was required reading for their course.\n\nRELATED CONTENT\n\n[books](https://disassociated.com/tag/books/), [education](https://disassociated.com/tag/education/), [language](https://disassociated.com/tag/language/), [novels](https://disassociated.com/tag/novels/), [trends](https://disassociated.com/tag/trends/)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/reading-was-something-we-used-to-do-before-ai-came-along", "canonical_source": "https://disassociated.com/we-read-before-arrival-ai/", "published_at": "2026-07-12 21:00:53+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-12 21:19:47.400541+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Harvard", "Margaret Rennix", "Anthony Burgess", "A Clockwork Orange", "ChatGPT", "The Atlantic"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/reading-was-something-we-used-to-do-before-ai-came-along", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/reading-was-something-we-used-to-do-before-ai-came-along.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/reading-was-something-we-used-to-do-before-ai-came-along.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/reading-was-something-we-used-to-do-before-ai-came-along.jsonld"}}