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 A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.)
I've not read clockwork orange, but i know plenty of people who'll stop reading a book if they had to look up words in a dictionary, maybe the students first instinct just wasn't a dictionary?
which is still not great, but way less terrifying than people needing an actual translation for a work written in their native language in the last century.
I thought it was a universal practice to keep a dictionary on standby on your phone when you're reading. On ebooks its even easier, just hold down on a new word to get it's definition.
Is this a rare practice? This "moat" to reading is barely a trickling stream. It makes me sad,; If I didn't push back any of the times I was blocked by a new word, I would have missed out on so many of the greatest stories ever told or taken to page.
i think it's that our brains like to do mostly easy things and learning new words is not easy, it has to fire up those neural pathways for that and create new connections for not a lot gratification for many people, simmiliar to how children often need external motivation to start to learn an instrument or other complex endeavors, because the fun part of it requires a suprising amount of practice and expertise, and if no one is pushing them to get through a specific book they'll pick an "easier" read or something else entirely for entertainment.
and I'd describe works by Fontane or other german authors as "old german", when it's merely old fashioned with words not in common use today, or not used in the same context, for which i remember using a dictionary. I know they used the same language as i do, there was no great shift in how the language worked, but the style and vocabulary used is enough to trip over if one is not used to it.
I don't think an llm is a good tool to engage with a text one thinks is difficult, but it's better than not engaging with the text at all.
I've found LLM is excellent to help understand how language use is different from one era to the next, or the meaning in a different structure/pattern (Clockwork Orange being an excellent example).
Just the other day I asked about a specific phrase in a 19th century novel that surprised me in it's specificity - the LLM clarified the author's meaning and that someone from the era would've understood the implications, while only an historian today would've got it.
Some 2,000 years later, under very different circumstances, the darkness is gathering again. Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.)
I mean, that excludes people who are reading text in electronic form other than e-books. Websites, various forms of text messaging, social media. My guess is that people most likely read considerably more text than they used to. They just may not be reading it in book or traditional mass-media form.
And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information.
...as the article body points out, somewhat at odds with the title.
Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis.
I mean, maybe. But that's a pretty different proposition than reading ending, and a lot of the numbers cited really aren't directly relevant to that claim, like the proportion that read newspapers.
Reading 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.
I mean...I can't read much Old English. And I'm pretty sure that if you go back 40 years or so, pre-mass-Internet-use, most of society would have a lot of trouble with even Middle English.
So off we went our several ways, me belching arrrrgh on the cold coke I’d peeted. I had my cut-throat britva handy in case any of Billyboy’s droogs should be around near the flatblock waiting, or for that matter any of the other bandas or gruppas or shaikas that from time to time were at war with one. Where I lived was with my dadda and mum in the flats of Mumapal Flatblock i8a, between
Kingsley Avenue and Wilsonsway I got to the big mam door with no trouble, though I did pass one young malchick sprawling and creeching and moanmg m the gutter, all cut about lovely , and saw in the lamplight also streaks of blood here and there like signatures, my brothers, of the night’s Allying.
The book is partially written in a Russian-influenced argot called "Nadsat"
Yeah.
The books that people do read are simpler than they used to be. New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago. Longer sentences aren’t inherently better. But their former ubiquity suggests an age when Americans had the inclination and ability to read serious works of literature.
Okay, but there's also been a shift that long predates the Internet towards shorter sentences. In general, spoken English uses shorter sentences than written English. Let me dig up a George Washington speech --- those sentences would be long by even written English standards of, say, 1990.
While, then, every part of our country thus feels an immediate and particular interest in Union, all the parts combined cannot fail to find in the united mass of means and efforts greater strength, greater resource, proportionably greater security from external danger, a less frequent interruption of their peace by foreign nations; and, what is of inestimable value, they must derive from Union an exemption from those broils and wars between themselves, which so frequently afflict neighbouring countries not tied together by the same governments, which their own rivalships alone would be sufficient to produce, but which opposite foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues would stimulate and embitter. Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty. In this sense it is, that your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other.
EDIT: Maybe the author's point is that the student thought that it was written in Old English, just because it was incomprehensible, and he was able to read it via ChatGPT without even learning which language he was reading? I guess that'd be kind of surprising, but...I'm not sure that that misunderstanding represents some sort of technology-induced downfall of civilization either. considers Honestly, if anything, I'd say that breaking down language barriers to that degree is probably a positive (though I suppose if part of the point of the work is to create linguistic barriers, you could say that it's defeating part of the point of the work). I mean, I read Journey to the West in an English translation rather than the original Chinese. I read Don Quixote in an English translation than the original Spanish. They were human translations rather than machine translations, but I don't think that anyone would hold those up as signs of the end of reading, either.
The problem with using ChatGPT for translation is that it will highly likely won't be an accurate translation or it might even hallucinate. Additionally the Clockwork Orange is hard to read on purpose, if you use ChatGPT there is not point in reading it; why translate made-up teenage slang. The author wanted the readers to understand it themselves, it is part of the fun.
It is true that people are probably reading more online than in the past, for example many people are probably reading from royal road. I for one used to read from royal road a lot, a lot of books from there even got published like Dungeon Crawler.
But in my opinion, I do think people are reading less due to tiktok, Instagram, and other social media sites. Reading level is going down.
Re "ChatGPT translation is bad": The article made a very particular claim, so we can check it in context. Is it bad at translating Clockwork Orange into modern english? I'm betting no, it's an old book with tons of helper material online to train from and use. But I welcome evidence to the contrary.
Re "Hard to read on purpose": This is the same argument against difficulty modes in games, and accessibility features in general. I find this entirely uncompelling.
Re "People are reading less": There's data here, and it largely supports your opinion.
14 replies
… I’m sorry, what the hell?
I've not read clockwork orange, but i know plenty of people who'll stop reading a book if they had to look up words in a dictionary, maybe the students first instinct just wasn't a dictionary?
which is still not great, but way less terrifying than people needing an actual translation for a work written in their native language in the last century.
I thought it was a universal practice to keep a dictionary on standby on your phone when you're reading. On ebooks its even easier, just hold down on a new word to get it's definition.
Is this a rare practice? This "moat" to reading is barely a trickling stream. It makes me sad,; If I didn't push back any of the times I was blocked by a new word, I would have missed out on so many of the greatest stories ever told or taken to page.
i think it's that our brains like to do mostly easy things and learning new words is not easy, it has to fire up those neural pathways for that and create new connections for not a lot gratification for many people, simmiliar to how children often need external motivation to start to learn an instrument or other complex endeavors, because the fun part of it requires a suprising amount of practice and expertise, and if no one is pushing them to get through a specific book they'll pick an "easier" read or something else entirely for entertainment.
A Clockwork Orange was written in English, but it’s heavily colored by Russian slang and has a lot of new words for an English speaker.
But like… they described it as “Old English”
Isn't A Clockwork Orange notorious for its weird language? Maybe the student thought it was old English.
and I'd describe works by Fontane or other german authors as "old german", when it's merely old fashioned with words not in common use today, or not used in the same context, for which i remember using a dictionary. I know they used the same language as i do, there was no great shift in how the language worked, but the style and vocabulary used is enough to trip over if one is not used to it.
I don't think an llm is a good tool to engage with a text one thinks is difficult, but it's better than not engaging with the text at all.
I've found LLM is excellent to help understand how language use is different from one era to the next, or the meaning in a different structure/pattern (Clockwork Orange being an excellent example).
Just the other day I asked about a specific phrase in a 19th century novel that surprised me in it's specificity - the LLM clarified the author's meaning and that someone from the era would've understood the implications, while only an historian today would've got it.
For real, it's not like reading Hobbes' Leviathan
I mean, that excludes people who are reading text in electronic form other than e-books. Websites, various forms of text messaging, social media. My guess is that people most likely read considerably more text than they used to. They just may not be reading it in book or traditional mass-media form.
...as the article body points out, somewhat at odds with the title.
I mean, maybe. But that's a pretty different proposition than reading ending, and a lot of the numbers cited really aren't directly relevant to that claim, like the proportion that read newspapers.
I mean...I can't read much Old English. And I'm pretty sure that if you go back 40 years or so, pre-mass-Internet-use, most of society would have a lot of trouble with even Middle English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English
It isn't the Internet doing that. It's the Norman occupation of Britain and subsequent language shifts.
I haven't read it, but I'm pretty sure that that's not written in Old English.
https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.182027/2015.182027.A-Clockwork-Orange_djvu.txt
Yeah. That's definitely not Old English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(novel)
Yeah.
Okay, but there's also been a shift that long predates the Internet towards shorter sentences. In general, spoken English uses shorter sentences than written English. Let me dig up a George Washington speech --- those sentences would be long by even written English standards of, say, 1990.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/George_Washington%27s_Farewell_Address
EDIT: Maybe the author's point is that the student thought that it was written in Old English, just because it was incomprehensible, and he was able to read it via ChatGPT without even learning which language he was reading? I guess that'd be kind of surprising, but...I'm not sure that that misunderstanding represents some sort of technology-induced downfall of civilization either. considers Honestly, if anything, I'd say that breaking down language barriers to that degree is probably a positive (though I suppose if part of the point of the work is to create linguistic barriers, you could say that it's defeating part of the point of the work). I mean, I read Journey to the West in an English translation rather than the original Chinese. I read Don Quixote in an English translation than the original Spanish. They were human translations rather than machine translations, but I don't think that anyone would hold those up as signs of the end of reading, either.
The problem with using ChatGPT for translation is that it will highly likely won't be an accurate translation or it might even hallucinate. Additionally the Clockwork Orange is hard to read on purpose, if you use ChatGPT there is not point in reading it; why translate made-up teenage slang. The author wanted the readers to understand it themselves, it is part of the fun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat
It is true that people are probably reading more online than in the past, for example many people are probably reading from royal road. I for one used to read from royal road a lot, a lot of books from there even got published like Dungeon Crawler.
But in my opinion, I do think people are reading less due to tiktok, Instagram, and other social media sites. Reading level is going down.
https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2024/federal-data-reading-pleasure-all-signs-show-slump
Re "ChatGPT translation is bad": The article made a very particular claim, so we can check it in context. Is it bad at translating Clockwork Orange into modern english? I'm betting no, it's an old book with tons of helper material online to train from and use. But I welcome evidence to the contrary.
Re "Hard to read on purpose": This is the same argument against difficulty modes in games, and accessibility features in general. I find this entirely uncompelling.
Re "People are reading less": There's data here, and it largely supports your opinion.
Firefoxes reader mode seems to bypass the paywall just fine, for anyone wanting tobread it without using archive.today/ph/is/...
I'd normally copy paste it into a comment, but this one would span multiple comments and i am lazy.