There was a time before smartphones when I read one or two books a week. Then that damned device made its way into my life and things were never the same. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t hate it. I love it; That’s the problem. From being a reader who could read two books a week, I have now become a reader who struggles to read even a book in two months. Whenever I open a book and start reading with good intentions, my phone conspires against me. One or the other notification keeps coming. Once I pick it up, it’s game over. The temptation to take a look at mail or social media is great. One quick glance turns into an hour of scrolling. The time scheduled for reading disappears.
I am not the only one suffering from this disease. With smartphones in practically every hand, it’s now just a part of the human condition.
What it was doing to our brains was a serious problem even before artificial intelligence came into the mix. Now smartphones not only have WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and X but also ChatGPT, Gemini and Cloud. Where not long ago you’d look for the answer to a question on Google, now you’ll likely look for it on AI. Instead of a list of links you have to sift through, the AI will give you a clean, well-written and even thoughtful answer.
There is no need to read or even scan a few pages of text to find the answer you are looking for. You will find this in some useful paragraphs.
This can also work with larger books.
Do you want to know what’s in a book without spending time and effort reading the entire book? Just ask the AI; This will give you a summary in text or audio in seconds.
It’s all very convenient, very easy.
The question is, what is all this convenience doing for us?
I have been an avid reader since I was in class 2. I have written three books. And now I struggle to finish books.
I fear that soon, everything beyond a paragraph will elicit the same reaction from most of us, whether we express it or not: tl;dr. too long; Didn’t read.
We are individually and even collectively as a species losing the ability to read long pieces of text, let alone write them.
Considering the central role of these abilities to read and write in the development of human civilization, this is a serious threat to all of us.
fake cases, fake research
ChatGPT was launched on November 30, 2022. Not even four years have passed since that day. Already, AI is everywhere. People are using it for all sorts of things, sometimes with worrying or ridiculous results.
In July, the Supreme Court of India expressed concern over non-existent AI-generated precedents being cited in judgments and court cases. The court was hearing a case in which it found that the National Company Law Tribunal had passed an order relying on fake AI-generated case laws.
This problem is hardly unique to India. Other countries are also grappling with a rise in the number of lawyers citing non-existent AI-hallucination cases. For example, a US court reprimanded the country’s Justice Department when one of its lawyers was caught citing a judgment in a case that did not exist.
Even researchers, including medical researchers, are not immune to the easy temptations of AI.
A groundbreaking study recently published in one of the world’s top medical journals, The Lancet4,046 completely fabricated references were found, spread across 2,810 published research papers. The rate of fake citations has exploded since the advent of AI, increasing four to 12 times from every 10,000 papers in 2023 to about 57 in every 10,000 papers in early 2026.
There are many such examples in different sectors, but my favorite is South Africa’s AI policy. The draft of the country’s National Artificial Intelligence Policy had to be withdrawn after it was discovered that it used references to academic journals that did not exist, and papers that were never published, all generated by the wonders of AI.
oh hallucination
There is a common tendency among people, including those drafting AI policy, to somehow feel that the machine knows best. It’s always well-written, and always admirable – and it’s designed for exactly that purpose.
The problem with the artificial intelligence we have is that it’s not really intelligence at all. There are different types of AI but the top AI that most of us use to answer questions, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Cloud and DeepSeq are all large language models.
The way they work is to first convert each word into numbers and represent them mathematically. Based on the prompt entered by the user and its own internal training data, it generates a probabilistic score to determine the first word of the answer it generates. Once this first word is out, the math functions will come up with the next word, and the next, and so on. So, AI is actually a very sophisticated predictive text system.
This means that it is not generating any answers that are based on fact. Nor is it giving you any constructive lessons. It is actually an adaptation to the most predictable sequence of words in response to a given cue. What you get is a plausible sequence of words, for example, AI policy, or legal cases, or medical research – which may include references to cases that don’t exist or research that was never done.
brain rot
The potential consequences of AI hallucinations are only part of the problem.
With everyone from scientists to lawyers and policy makers outsourcing research and writing to AI, the need for deep reading – what we used to call studying – has diminished. But reading a book with concentration does more than learn from it. It also affects our brain in a way that is very different from digital devices.
In her book Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, author and academic Maryanne Wolf writes about, among other things, the declining attention spans of adults. We don’t read any more; We skim. There are always countless things competing for our attention, so staying focused has become a challenge.
These changes are internal. They are happening in our brain. The way our eyes move on a screen is different from the way they move on a piece of paper. Skimming and browsing habits become ingrained over time. We simply lose the ability to concentrate. We are always distracted.
Professor Wolf highlights the important relationship between the quality of reading and the quality of thought, which is strongly influenced by variations in attention span and what she calls “cognitive patience”. He mentioned letters he had received from professors who complained that their students did not have the patience to read dense texts.
Loss of cognitive patience inevitably leads to what is being called cognitive surrender. People outsource their thinking to AI, considering it an oracle for all occasions.
Naturally, the temptation to do this is especially strong when one is faced with a writing assignment and a deadline. It’s no surprise that everyone from graduate students to judges in tribunals is falling for AI generated content.
writing is thinking
A key feature of the human brain is neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to strengthen, form, or prune neural connections throughout life. When we stop using certain neural circuits, those circuits break down.
It’s not much different from the way the rest of our bodies work. If we want our muscles to be strong we have to exercise them; Someone who doesn’t do any kind of exercise and only eats junk food will essentially be unfit.
Nowadays people are very careful about their food. However, when they watch what they put into their bodies, they are less careful about what they put into their minds. A diet of endless doomscrolling on X or Facebook is hardly conducive to good mental health.
There are many reasons why we should take care of our brain just like we do our muscles. The way to do this is simple.
We have to protect our reading habits.
Now we do not need to walk or jog to go from place A to place B. Car, bus or motorcycle can take us. But walking is important for our own health.
Similarly, we don’t need to actually read a book to get the gist of something; There are quick and easy ways to get information. But we still need to read deeply to develop and maintain our cognitive patience and attention.
AI can write our emails, reports and papers. The point is that writing is simultaneously an act of thinking. We have to understand our materials and organize our ideas before we can write them in a solid and coherent way.
When we outsource all that to AI, we can copy-paste the results, but we won’t know the content, and it won’t be our own thinking.
Over time, the adage of “use it or lose it” applied to our bodies and minds will take over, and we – and our children – will simply lose the ability to research and think on our own.
If we give up reading and writing then the development of artificial intelligence will actually be accompanied by the development of natural stupidity. Reading and writing are gyms for our brain.
Samrat Chaudhary teaches at the Writing Centre, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence.
