OCTOBER 14 — One of the most popular services artificial intelligence provides is the ability to summarise texts and even video content in seconds. For many students, this feels like a reason to celebrate. The burden of a three hour lecture or a dense textbook, often accompanied by profound vocabularies, can seemingly be lifted with a single click. However, as educators, parents, guardians, and students, we should be deeply concerned. This convenience is contributing to a rapid decline in our attention spans, which are already struggling under the weight of short form social media clips.

I often wonder if deleting our social media accounts would allow us to reclaim the ability to read fifty books a year. Many of us now settle for fleeting reviews perfected by algorithms instead of engaging with the original source. The skill of summarising was once a foundational part of the Malaysian English syllabus, yet we are seeing it slowly disappearing from national assessments. Perhaps it is time for us to ask ourselves why we have come to detest the act of reading so much that the moment AI offered to do it for us, it felt like a boulder being lifted from our shoulders.

Reading originally began as a way to refer to records, but it evolved into a profound form of intellectual entertainment as well. Today, we live in a culture of 2X speed. We listen to podcasts at double time and skim bullet points between meetings. Some even regard reading social media captions as a form of literacy. While the fascinating use of slang is a conversation for another day, this is not the deep reading we need. The true experience of reading is far more immersive. It is the act of sitting comfortably and allowing the words of philosophers and authors to trigger a creative hallucination in our own minds.

When we read deeply, our brains work differently. We do not just consume, we engage. We agree or disagree with writers, reorganise our thoughts to try to understand new ones, and recognise complex cultural nuances. However, when deep reading disappears and we become mere consumers of AI summaries, we lose more than just time. We lose the ability to sit with our own complexities. We become incapable of forming the logic behind our thoughts or justifying our choices. These are far greater issues than a declining vocabulary or poor grammar.

At the same time, we are also losing our ability to observe. If we cannot observe the nuances in writing, or understand the subtle shift when a person’s mood suddenly becomes sour, what distinguishes us from the machines? When learners are at the mercy of AI summaries, they are simultaneously at the mercy of machine interpretations. They allow themselves to be led because they are no longer practicising the skills of identifying errors, recognising patterns, or formulating independent logical conclusions.

Being able to condense a thousand-word text into two hundred words is not merely about brevity. It is an exercise in logic. It teaches a student how to transition thoughts so the flow is seamless. Independent thinking does not come naturally, it is prompted by the words on a page.

When we allow AI to lessen our reading workload, the skill of deep reading vanishes as we are essentially choosing to rely on a machine to do the thinking for us.

While AI provides us with vast amounts of information and perhaps grants us more free time, we fail to notice the true cost. That time is often gained at the expense of our declining skills, skills that, for some, were never truly learned from the beginning. The struggle to understand a difficult text is exactly what builds our cognitive stamina. In this digital age, we have the opportunity to reach corners of the world that our ancestors never knew existed. It would be a shame to continue living in an AI bubble when the world is our oyster. To be masters of AI, we must never forget to first remain the masters of our own focus and thoughts.

* The writer is an English Language Lecturer at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya, and can be reached at yongxinjie@um.edu.my

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.