Mother Mary, Bollywood and ChatGPT

Before I sat down to write this piece, I did something I often warn my students against: I asked ChatGPT to write on ‘Reading in the Age of AI’ for me. Now, don’t get me wrong! As a professor who sternly cautions against the use of generative AI on account of ethical and climate concerns in the university classroom, I approached the prompt with a certain moral armour. My aim was purely forensic: to see what it would get wrong, an exposé to demonstrate with pedagogical flair, all the things humans are capable of doing better.

The moment I read the piece, I realised I had made a mistake. And it wasn’t because it was particularly bad, but because it was just good enough to hem in my own thinking. The irony is still not lost on me. In trying to critique the tool, I had let it shape the very critique. This, I now believe, is part of the deeper problem. Not that generative AI says the wrong things, but that it says them too predictably. And in doing so, it can diminish not only our originality, but our understanding of what originality even is. Yes, I came to the bot with my bias. But that bias, it turns out, may have been well earned.

This deserves a more serious pondering. In literature classrooms, where students increasingly lean on ChatGPT to generate summaries or skim through interpretations, it is tempting to say that reading is what suffers. However, it is thinking that has taken the greater hit. Reading, after all, still occurs technically. What is lost, almost imperceptibly, is the slow and quiet battle with words, form and ambiguity that demands a constant, often maddening, negotiation of thought. It is the kind of turmoil, an inward dissonance, that when resolved, yields the satiated feeling of fitting the final piece into a jigsaw puzzle only to awaken, moments later, a familiar restlessness to know more, to question what we think we know.

It is this recursive cycle of learning, unlearning, relearning that fuels the peculiar ache and essence of human thought. A kind of existential footnote to Hamlet’s eternal question: not just to be or not to be, but to understand, doubt, then try again. In this context, Chat GPT just becomes a Frankesteinian prosthetic, offering the appearance of understanding, while something ineffable, something stubbornly and essentially human, remains absent.

What is more unsettling is how seamlessly this fits into a broader ideological apparatus. ChatGPT is not neutral. It is not just a clever tool that floats outside the systems of power. It is built within, and arguably for, the very systems that reward speed over reflection, product over process, and clarity without complexity. And when we use these tools to shape how we read, and more crucially, how we think about reading, we relinquish more than just the pleasure of reading: We relinquish the agency to think for ourselves.

It leads, quietly but unmistakably, to cognitive decline. Not the dramatic kind that shows up on neurological scans, but a more insidious erosion of our capacity for independent judgment. To see how this plays out, consider two recent cultural moments: Arundhati Roy’s ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’ and Aryan Khan’s ‘The Ba***ds of Bollywood’. Before a reader has cracked the spine of Roy’s book or a viewer has streamed even a second of Khan’s Netflix show, the media ecosystem has already built the interpretive scaffolding. The work arrives pre-framed, and its meaning pre-digested.

With Roy’s book, the reception split along the predictable lines: was she being too radical or not radical enough? The book became a proxy for every cultural anxiety its readers brought to it, most of which were fed to them beforehand by a thousand content streams about her political views, Booker win, choice of textiles and jewellery. And with Khan’s series, the entire discourse was manufactured before a single shot could be evaluated by the viewer. Perhaps for the first time, the director eclipsed the cast in cultural relevance from the outset. Predictably, this shift had little to do with the show’s content or aesthetics. The art became secondary to its PR narrative, which in turn was filtered through the same language models that now assist with film reviews, comment threads, and even award citations.

It is clear that we are no longer allowed the luxury or the risk of approaching art unmediated. There is always a headline waiting to tell us what to think, an algorithm trained on our preferences, a “hot take” nudging us toward moral certainty or aesthetic allegiance. ChatGPT doesn’t create this reality, but it packages impressions, trends, and ideological cues into plausible prose, delivered instantly. It doesn’t push us to think on our own; it simply tells us what to think. And when enough people start speaking in that flattened idiom, when analysis begins to resemble autocomplete, when reading becomes an echo of echoes, we have to ask: who’s really doing the thinking anymore?

The tragedy does not solely lie in the fact that we are offloading the labour of reading and interpreting, but that we are surrendering our freedom to enter a book or film, and emerge transformed, uncertain, provoked. This is what is endangered. Not reading per se, but reading as a revolutionary act, as a way of thinking — not merely consuming.

— The writer is an assistant professor at School of Languages and Culture, Amity University, Mohali

(On a cautionary note, this piece was written independently without the assistance of ChatGPT. The reference in the first paragraph serves as a creative hook to engage readers with a touch of nuance that remains beyond the scope of AI, for now)