Come to Scoff, Stay to Loaf
Are chatbots making reading pointless? As someone who has loved reading since I was a pre-schooler, and loved being read to since I was a baby, I hate the thought of this. But is there, for example, any point in reading a newspaper or magazine, when the editor could be saving money by having the articles written by a text-generating AI that just assembles a random selection of words that bear no relation to anything in reality? Is there any point in asking or answering questions online, when the questions I find may not have been posted by a real person – not even by a bored, mischievous teenager trolling – and the answers I receive to my questions may not be based on anyone’s real-life experience? So, reclusive as I am by habit, I have had to accept that if I want to be sure that what I am interacting with is a person, I need to meet people and talk to them face-to-face, and that it’s worth getting to know the people in my area better. After all, I’ve lived in Nettlebridge f