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| A scholar at work. Not a self-portrait, but a nice example of how I see myself at work. A bit of architectural sculpture found in the Sterling Library at Yale. |
... for a long time. For years, I kept a well-thumbed dictionary close at hand so I could look up all those words I didn't quite know, or was slightly uncertain about. (That's how you learn that a word like "peruse" is a a contronym, a word with two opposite definitions. The original meaning was "to read very carefully," but it has come to also mean the opposite: "to skim over lightly.")
My dictionary led me to understand what words really mean--like polynya (a non-linear opening in the ice pack), or spezzatura (an Italian word that refers to a kind of effortless grace), or Rückenfigur (an image composition where a person's back is included in the scene, facing out to the view rather than at the viewer).
Ever since smartphones became ubiquitous, I've always read with a phone nearby for much the same reason. To look up things along the way. I actually really like this ability to instantly look up things and the ability to get as much detail as I need, often with figures included.
We can now extend this habit to include asking your favorite AI questions about the book you're reading, asking questions that are really difficult to search for with "classic" Googling.
For example, I'm currently reading The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu, Part 2 of the "Remembrance of Earth's Past" trilogy. It's a fun read, but I read Part 1 (The Three Body Problem) early last year, That was a big book, and Part 2 is aksi a big book that's very dense with ideas and substory lines.
(Spoiler warning: A detail is discussed below that you might want to skip if you're planning on reading the trilogy. Skip to the "Caution" below.)
After a couple hundred pages, I realize that an important plot point is that the Trisolarians have, as a key part of their invasion stragegy, managed to block all important physics research taking place on Earth. But for the life of me, I could not remember HOW they managed to accomplish this.
To make things worse, I also managed to lose/misplace my copy of volume 1. Ugh. Now what? I didn't want to read the Wikipedia page on the book as it might well contain spoilers.
Then I realized I could ask my AI buddy this question and I'd probably get a decent answer. So I whip out my phone, and ask this question:
This is exactly what I needed to restore my memory about what happened in Book 1.
Note that I was careful to ask a fairly specific question, not anything that might reveal upcoming plot points.
Caution: A VERY important skill to develop is the ability to NOT get sucked down the rabbit hole. Yes, I know that clickbaity thing just demands to be checked-out, but don't do it. Don't turn a lovely, engaging, wonderful reading experience into endless hours of slop-content reading.
Hallucinations? Maybe, but I find that the questions I ask of AI while reading tend to be fairly specific ("what's that?" or "when did this happen?" or "what's the connection between Person 1 and Person 1?"), so the probability of hallucinations is much less. Usually my while-reading questions are an easy RAG ("Retrieval Augmented Generation") task, and they tend to have fewer errors like this.
In early smartphone days, I would use it as a dictionary. Then, as Wikipedia came easy available, I could look up specific topics (but having to avoid spoilers).
Now I can ask fairly sophisticated questions of my AI buddy... and that's the way I think of it. As Ethan Mollick points out in his book Co-Intelligence, a very reasonable mental model is to consider an AI as a colleague, one who can answer questions about your work project. In this case, my project is to read and understand a book.
So, while reading The Wide, Wide Sea: Imperial ambition, first contact and the fateful final voyage of Captain James Cook, I could ask a question like this:
That's a useful bit of background.
Or, while reading a scholarly article on The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures, I could ask a question like this (because the author assumed that the reader would know this information implicitly--I am not his target audience):
I have to admit that I didn't know what the Arkansas Basin was, including that it was huge--so this summary was great background material for me to read.
Reading has always been about more than just sitting with the text on the page--good readers have always used external sources to amplify and enrich their understanding. Now, it's easier than ever. Hope you take advantage.
SearchResearch Lessons
There's one big lesson here... I now make it a habit to co-read with an AI partner, not to summarize, but to enhance my reading by giving me important background that I don't have. I rely on the AI partner to answer questions about the material that I never understood in the first place, or to give my memory a boost... especially when reading long texts... especially when subsequent books are read years apart.
I'm looking forward to re-reading (for the 4th time) the entire Lord of the Rings epic series... this time with AI augmentation. (I know who Tom Bombadil is, but who is Gildor Inglorion?)
This time, Gemini can be my intelligent vademecum and fill me in on the backstory.
Keep searching.
