Optimizing Reading Time with AI Critique

The provided text is an excerpt from a blog post titled "How to Avoid Reading" on the Philosophics site, detailing an author’s strategy for optimising reading time by using ChatGPT. The author, Bry Willis, feeds the title of David Ohana’s book, The Intellectual Origins of Modernity, to the AI to determine if reading the full text is worthwhile. The bulk of the source consists of a dialogue between the human author and ChatGPT, where the AI offers a critical assessment of Ohana's work, characterising it as a "superficial survey" that synthesises well-known figures rather than offering original research. The AI’s critique concludes that the book is more a well-written, approachable work for undergraduates or for satisfying "publish or perish" requirements than it is for advanced scholarship, leading the human author to decide against committing to reading the entire volume.https://philosophics.blog/2025/11/05/how-to-avoid-reading/