My tween-age daughters make me proud in countless ways, but I am still adjusting to the fact that they are not bookworms. I’m pretty sure that two generations ago, they would have been more like I was: always with their nose in some volume, looking up only to cross the street or to guide a fork on their plates. But today, even in our book-crammed home, where their father is often in a cozy reading chair, their eyes are more likely to be glued to a screen.

我的青少年女儿们在无数方面都让我感到骄傲，但我仍在适应她们不是“书虫”这个事实。我相当肯定，如果是在两代人之前，她们会更像我一样：总是埋头于书卷之中，只有过马路或者将叉子送到嘴边时才抬起头来。然而如今，即使在我们这个堆满书的家里，即使她们的父亲经常坐在舒适的阅读椅上，她们的目光却更有可能盯着屏幕。

But then, as often as not, what I’m doing in that cozy chair these days is looking at my own screen.

但话说回来，如今我坐在那张舒适的椅子上，常常也是在看我自己的屏幕。

In 1988, I read much of Anna Karenina on park benches in Washington Square. I’ll never forget when a person sitting next to me saw what I was reading and said, “Oh, look, Anna and Vronsky are over there!” So immersed was I in Tolstoy’s epic that I looked up and briefly expected to see them walking by.

1988年，我常常坐在华盛顿广场的长椅上阅读《安娜·卡列尼娜》。我永远不会忘记，当时坐在我旁边的一个人看到我在读这本书，就说：“哦，你看，安娜和渥伦斯基在那边呢！” 我当时完全沉浸在托尔斯泰这部鸿篇巨著中，以至于我抬起头，竟然短暂地期待着能看到他们从我身边走过。

Today, on that same park bench, I would most certainly be scrolling on my phone.

而今天，坐在同一个公园长椅上的我，肯定是在刷手机了。

As a linguist, a professor, and an author, I’m meant to bemoan this shift. It is apparently the job of educators everywhere to lament the fact that students are reading less than they used to, and that they are relying on AI to read for them and write their essays, too. Honestly, these developments don’t keep me up at night. It seems wrongheaded to feel wistful for a time when students had far less information at their fingertips. And who can blame them for letting AI do much of the work that they are likely to let AI do anyway when they enter the real world?

作为一名语言学家、教授和作家，我理应为此转变感到惋惜。毕竟，各地教育工作者似乎都理应感叹学生阅读量不如从前，并且他们还依赖人工智能（AI）代读和代写论文。说实话，这些发展并没有让我夜不能寐。怀念学生获取信息远不如现在触手可及的时代，这种想法似乎是错误的。况且，当他们步入社会后，也很可能会让AI代劳很多工作，那我们又怎能指责他们现在让AI完成大部分学业任务呢？

Young people are certainly reading less. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, while 11.5 percent said they hadn’t read any, according to the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future survey. By 2022, those percentages had basically flipped; an ever-shrinking share of young people seems to be moved to read for pleasure.

年轻人读书确实少了。根据密歇根大学的“监测未来”调查（Monitoring the Future survey），1976年大约有40%的高中毕业生表示他们在过去一年中至少读了六本书，纯粹是为了娱乐；而11.5%的人表示他们一本也没读。到了2022年，这些百分比基本颠倒了过来；愿意为了乐趣而阅读的年轻人所占比例似乎正在持续萎缩。

Plenty of cultural critics argue that this is worrisome—that the trend of prizing images over the written word, short videos over books, will plunge us all into communal stupidity. I believe they are wrong.

许多文化评论家认为这令人担忧——他们觉得，这种把图像看得比文字重、把短视频看得比书本重的趋势，最终会让我们所有人都陷入集体愚蠢。但我认为他们错了。

Print and its benefits will not disappear. It merely has to share the stage. Critics may argue that the competition for eyeballs yields far too much low-quality, low-friction content, all of it easily consumed with a fractured attention span. But this ignores the proliferation of thoughtful writing and insightful dialogues, the rise of Substack newsletters and podcasts, which speaks to a demand for more ideas, more information—more opportunities to read and think, not less.

印刷品及其益处不会消失。它只是需要与他人共享舞台。批评者可能会争辩说，对眼球的争夺产生了太多低质量、低门槛的内容，所有这些内容都可以在注意力分散的情况下被轻松消费。但这忽略了深思熟虑的文章和富有洞察力的对话的激增，以及Substack电子报和播客的兴起，这表明人们对更多思想、更多信息——更多阅读和思考的机会——的需求，而不是更少。

My daughters still read books; they just prefer to commit their time to works they are on fire about. This includes Tahereh Mafi’s Shatter Me series and Chris Colfer’s luscious six-book Land of Stories series, which they liked so much when I read it to them that we might do it again. When I was their age, I read far too many books that weren’t very good, because what else was I going to do? Maybe it taught me something about patience and tolerance for experiences that don’t deliver a dopamine high, but I sure would’ve been grateful if shows like The White Lotus had been around.

我的女儿们仍然读书；她们只是更喜欢把时间投入到她们真正热爱的作品中。这包括塔赫拉·马菲（Tahereh Mafi）的《粉碎我》（Shatter Me）系列，以及克里斯·柯尔弗（Chris Colfer）精彩的六部曲《故事之地》（Land of Stories）系列——我给她们读这些书时，她们非常喜欢，以至于我们可能还会再读一遍。在我像她们这么大的时候，我读了太多不怎么好的书，因为那时候我还能做什么呢？也许这教会了我一些关于耐心，以及如何忍受那些无法带来多巴胺快感的经历。但我肯定会很庆幸，如果当时有《白莲花度假村》（The White Lotus）这样的节目。

The choice for entertainment used to be between Middlemarch and music hall, Sister Carrie and vaudeville, The Invisible Man and I Dream of Jeannie. Today, our appetite for easy, silly content is sated by the mindless videos online, the snippets of animal misadventures and makeup tips that my girls sheepishly tell me they are watching. I have begun limiting just how much of that digital junk they gorge on each day. But dismissing all online clips as crude or stupefying misses the cleverness amid the slop. Both of my girls are wittier than I was at their ages, largely because of all the comedic and stylized language they witness online. The ubiquity of some content doesn’t mean it lacks art.

过去，娱乐的选择可能是在《米德尔马奇》和歌舞厅之间，在《嘉莉妹妹》和滑稽歌舞剧之间，或者在《隐形人》和《我梦寐以求的珍妮》这类电视节目之间。如今，我们对轻松、无聊内容的渴望，被网上那些无需动脑的视频所满足——比如我女儿们羞怯地告诉我她们正在看的，那些动物滑稽遭遇的片段和化妆技巧。我已经开始限制她们每天沉迷于这些数字垃圾的时长。但是，如果把所有在线短片都视为粗俗或愚蠢，那就忽略了其中可能蕴含的巧妙之处。我的两个女儿都比我同龄时更机智幽默，这很大程度上是因为她们在网上接触到了各种幽默且有风格的语言。某些内容的无处不在，并不意味着它缺乏艺术性。

Critics will argue that books are more valuable than videos because they demand more imagination—purportedly creating better, stronger thinkers. But this familiar argument strikes me as an ex post facto justification for existing prejudices. If there had always been video, I doubt many people would wish we could distill these narratives into words so that we could summon up our own images. I have also never seen the argument that theater disadvantages viewers by providing visuals instead of letting people read the plays for themselves. Plenty of people used to argue that radio was better than television because it demanded imagination, but who among us thinks that Severance would have been better as a radio show?

批评者会争辩说，书籍比视频更有价值，因为它们要求更多的想象力——据说能培养出更优秀、更强大的思考者。但在我看来，这种常见的论点不过是对现有偏见的“事后辩解”。如果视频一直存在，我怀疑是否还会有人希望我们能把这些叙事提炼成文字，以便我们自己去构想画面。我也从未见过有论点说，戏剧通过提供视觉画面而非让人们自己阅读剧本来对观众造成了劣势。过去很多人都争论说广播比电视更好，因为它要求想象力，但我们当中有谁会认为《人生切割术》（Severance，一部美剧）如果做成广播节目会更好呢？

We may be overestimating just how much heavy reading students were doing before. (CliffsNotes, anyone?) When I was in college, few of my peers read everything they were assigned. My own students from a pre-TikTok era admit that they, too, neglected most of the material. This is partly because professors often assign boatloads of text, yet discuss only fragments of it. I recall having to read an endless and nettlesome chunk of Kierkegaard that the professor never even addressed, and Federico García Lorca’s play Bodas de Sangre, about which we discussed a single page. When a student some time ago accused me in an evaluation of making similarly excessive demands, I realized it was time to stop. I now prefer to assign more manageable passages of text that we are sure to discuss. It’s a better use of their time and mine, and it yields better conversations in class.

我们可能高估了学生们过去所做的“大量阅读”。（有人用过像CliffsNotes这样的学习指南吗？）我上大学的时候，很少有同学能读完所有布置的材料。我那些来自TikTok出现之前的学生们也承认，他们同样忽略了大部分内容。部分原因在于，教授们常常布置海量的文本，却只讨论其中的零星片段。我记得自己曾被迫阅读丹麦哲学家克尔凯郭尔（Kierkegaard）一段冗长又令人头疼的文字，而教授却从未提及；还有费德里科·加西亚·洛尔卡（Federico García Lorca）的剧作《血的婚礼》（Bodas de Sangre），我们只讨论了一页。几年前，当一名学生在评估中指责我提出了类似过高的要求时，我意识到是时候停止了。我现在更喜欢布置篇幅更适中、且我们一定会讨论的文本段落。这能更好地利用学生和我的时间，也能带来更深入的课堂讨论。

The rise of AI does mean that I will never again assign a classic five-paragraph essay on an abstract topic. Discuss the expression of irony in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Discuss Aristotle’s conception of virtue in contrast to that of Plato. Perhaps I sound like I am abjuring my role as professor. But I am merely bowing to the realities of technology. AI can now write those essays. Sending students off to write them is like sending them off to do fractions as if they won’t use the calculator on their phone.

人工智能的兴起，确实意味着我将不再布置关于抽象主题的经典五段式论文，例如讨论简·奥斯汀《傲慢与偏见》中讽刺手法的运用，或是对比探讨亚里士多德与柏拉图的美德观。也许我听起来像是在放弃我作为教授的职责，但我只是在顺应科技发展的现实。人工智能现在可以写出这类论文了。让学生去写这些论文，就像让他们去做分数运算，却假装他们手机上没有计算器一样。

The whole point of that old-school essay was to foster the ability to develop an argument. Doing this is still necessary, we just need to take a different tack. In some cases, this means asking that students write these essays during classroom exams—without screens, but with those dreaded blue books. I have also found ways of posing questions that get past what AI can answer, such as asking for a personal take—How might we push society to embrace art that initially seems ugly?—that draws from material discussed in class. Professors will also need to establish more standards for in-class participation.

传统议论文的全部意义在于培养学生提出论点的能力。培养这种能力依然必要，我们只是需要采取不同的策略。在某些情况下，这意味着要求学生在课堂考试中撰写这些论文——不能使用电子屏幕，而是用那些令人头疼的纸质答题本（即传统的蓝色答题册）。我还找到了提出一些超越人工智能回答能力的问题的方法，比如要求学生提出个人看法——“我们如何推动社会接纳那些初看起来‘丑陋’的艺术？”——这些问题都源于课堂上讨论过的材料。教授们还需要为课堂参与制定更多标准。

I loathed writing essays in college. The assignments felt too abstract and disconnected from anything I cared about, and I disliked how little control I had over whether I could get a good grade—it was never clear to me what a “good” essay was. I know I wasn’t alone. I always loved school, but those dry, daunting essay assignments kept me from knowing that I could love writing. I do not regret that AI has marginalized this particular chore. There are other ways to teach students how to think.

我在大学时非常讨厌写论文。这些作业感觉太抽象了，与我关心的任何事情都格格不入。而且，我对自己能否取得好成绩几乎没有掌控感——我从不清楚一篇“好”论文究竟是什么样的。我知道我不是唯一有这种感觉的人。我一直热爱学校，但那些枯燥又令人生畏的论文作业让我无法体会到自己可能热爱写作。我一点也不后悔人工智能让这项特定的苦差事变得不再重要。毕竟，还有其他方式来教学生如何思考。

Essays are also meant to train students to use proper grammar to express themselves in a clear and socially acceptable way. Well, there was also a time when a person needed to know how to grow their own food and tie a bow tie. We’re past that, along with needing to know how to avoid dangling participles. We will always need to express ourselves clearly, but AI tools now offer us ways to accomplish this.

论文（或议论文）的另一个作用是训练学生使用正确的语法，以清晰且符合社会规范的方式表达自己。当然，曾几何时，人们需要知道如何种植自己的食物和系领结。如今我们已经不再需要这些技能了，就像我们不再需要刻意学习如何避免悬垂分词一样。我们永远需要清晰地表达自己，但现在人工智能工具为我们提供了实现这一目标的方法。

It bears noting that quite a few grammar rules are less about clarity than about fashion or preference, which we are expected to master like a code of dress-–Oxford commas (or not!), when to use which versus that (something made up out of thin air by the grammarian Henry Fowler), fewer books rather than less books. AI now tells us how to navigate these codes. Some of us will still enjoy knowing when to use who versus whom, just as I might care to properly tie a bow tie, at least once. But most people will be more than happy to outsource this to a machine.

值得注意的是，许多语法规则与其说是为了清晰表达，不如说是为了符合约定俗成或个人偏好，而我们被期望像掌握着装规范一样去掌握它们——比如牛津逗号（用或不用都有争议！）、何时使用which而非that（这是语法学家亨利·福勒凭空创造出来的规则）、以及fewer books（用于可数名词）而非less books（用于不可数名词）的区分。人工智能现在能告诉我们如何应对这些规范。我们中有些人仍然会乐于知道何时使用who（主格）何时使用whom（宾格），就像我可能至少有一次会想亲手打好一个漂亮的领结一样。但大多数人会非常乐意把这部分工作外包给机器来做。

Sure, it’s disorienting to wonder whether either of my own children will ever embrace long, classic novels. But they now enjoy a richer array of material than I ever did, and my job is simply to encourage them to engage with the best of it as much as possible—even if that means they will likely encounter less Tolstoy than I did. And although I find grammar rules intriguing enough to have devoted much of my life to studying them, I don’t mind that my daughters and students needn’t expend so much energy mastering these often-arbitrary dictates. My hope is that by having AI handle some of this busy work, they will have more time to actually think for themselves.

确实，想到我的孩子们是否会喜欢上长篇经典小说，这让我感到有些迷茫。但他们现在能接触到的材料比我当年丰富得多，我的职责就是鼓励他们尽可能多地去接触其中最优秀的部分——即便这意味着他们接触的托尔斯泰作品会比我少。虽然语法规则对我来说足够有趣，以至于我将大半生都投入到研究中，但我并不介意我的女儿们和学生们不必花费那么多精力去掌握这些常常显得武断的规则。我希望通过让AI处理这些繁琐的工作，他们能有更多的时间真正地独立思考。