By Rebecca Richards
Meta recently published an ad titled, “Talk it out with Meta AI – Book Club,” where AI serves as both an event planner and literary professor within the span of 30 seconds.
The ad clearly misses the irony of its own title as talking things out is the point of a book club. Cringeworthy enough on its own, the ad inspires broader concerns with turning too quickly to AI to outsource some of the most human things in life.
The ad’s main character asks Meta AI to plan a book club discussing Moby-Dick. Meta AI suggests how to set up her apartment with a nautical bend and pun-based appetizers.
The next shot, though, offers help interpreting the book’s themes. Meta AI tells the main character that “the whale represents the vastness of life and the meaninglessness of existence.”
One can hardly complain that AI is spoiling a book published in 1851, but there is something odd about the exchange, especially as Meta AI subsequently offers the discussion point of “revenge.” The ad implies that you can discuss a book well without having to read it.
Not finishing a book is almost an inevitable part of any book club, nor is turning to the Internet for last-minute plot details a new idea. What, then, makes artificial intelligence problematic when so many busy readers already turn to SparkNotes or Wikipedia for a synopsis?
After all, Moby-Dick is a literary behemoth of nearly 700 pages. In a book club, though, no one is forced to join or even show up—there is no grade for having the most insightful analysis. The reward is, supposedly, the experience of reading the book and having an interesting conversation about it with others who also read, or struggled to read, the book.
AI offers a shortcut to the heart of a book, at least as defined by the writers whose work has informed the algorithm. But we should be wary of trading efficiency for genuine insight. Imagine a discussion in which every member solely parroted analyses from AI. Would this even count as a discussion? Or would it go down as human beings failing the Turing Test and becoming the computer ourselves, capable only of mirroring someone else’s views?
Compelling discussions come from reading a text through your own vantage point. You contribute original ideas, which others may not have considered, and they do the same. This generates even more new ideas, ones that could not have been found by asking ChatGPT.
These conversations generate more than new ideas. We build friendships by sharing in a common activity, such as reading the same book together. When you do not actually share the experience by digging into the text, a core element of genuine connection is lost.
The ad misses this connection and confuses the value of reading with the end result of knowing a book’s plot and themes. There are some things, like friendship, that seem to be distinctly human and not replaceable by AI.
Yet, Mark Zuckerberg recently predicted that artificial intelligence will fill in the gap in human relationships to serve as a friend and even as a therapist. Once again, like the ad does with book clubs, using AI to fill this need confuses the final result of friendship or reading a book as more valuable than the process.
AI is undeniably useful. In the first half of Meta’s ad, for instance, AI saves time with its instructions for arranging the room for entertaining, which not everyone enjoys. However, a book club, particularly those discussing heavier literature, is not the place for efficiency.
In Moby-Dick’s first few pages, Melville describes how anyone lost in thought finds their way to something outside of themselves. He writes, “There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water.” It is this being lost in thought that AI short-circuits.
Use AI as an intern if you must, but avoid relying on it as a literary authority.
Being lost in thought is, in many ways, itself a lost art. The attention economy, a term coined in the 1970s by psychologist, economist, and Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon, highlights the premium placed on attention when we are inundated with information. This inundation has only increased, and now, as Chris Hayes writes in The Atlantic, attention is the “defining resource of our age.”
Our attention is worth more than it ever has been, but our lives encourage us to swipe right past boredom and straight to gratification. Reading is one way to break that hold and exercise delayed gratification.
Our cultural disregard for reading books is reflected by a shift in education noted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Atlantic, and Psychology Today. Students are not assigned full books, nor do they choose to read them for fun.
From one perspective, why should they? Humanities programs are perceived as a waste of time and money for college students looking for employment. Students are instructed to look at STEM rather than Shakespeare, and the barista with an MFA is a well-established punchline. Classics like Moby-Dick are treated as, at best, a relic, and at worst, the perpetration of white, male supremacy.
Several authors, primarily academics, have vigorously defended the value of the classics, both in higher education, like Roosevelt Montás, and in daily life, like Zena Hitz. The case for reading literature historically classified as “great” is remarkably similar to the argument against relying on AI as a literature professor.
These books offer a path for us to follow in our individual quests to find meaning and reconcile the many lenses through which we see the world. Reading these books provides a sense of achievement, both in simply finishing such a long text and in deciphering its meaning.
Unraveling great texts does not appeal to everyone. Meta’s ad would feel far less realistic if AI summarized the plot and meaning of A Court of Thorns and Roses, a book read for fun. Moby-Dick requires sustained effort and attention, but AI gives the reader the feeling of having grappled with the plot, characterization, and meaning without the process of actually doing so.
The appeal is obvious for a busy student. It is less so for a book club that seems, based on the ad, to be composed of adults attending by their own free will. Both groups face constant demands for their attention, but choosing to attend or host a book club should be because reading is enjoyable and worthwhile, not to project a fake intellectual prowess with takes from ChatGPT or to cosplay intellectual growth.
Yes, AI can provide conversation topics. It could make you sound intelligent and insightful. But AI cannot bring you through the monotony of a long journey by sea to the realization that you may face your own white whale.
AI will not make you smarter. You are unlikely to forget a book that took days of your life to read. You will forget what AI told you about the book. Use AI as an intern if you must, but avoid relying on it as a literary authority. “Call me Meta” doesn’t have quite the same ring.
