Episode
Naomi Baron, American University - Negotiating How Much AI Reads for Us
- Podcast
- The Academic Minute
- Published
- Jun 30, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 150
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Summary
What are the consequences of letting AI read for us? Naomi Baron , professor emerita of linguistics at American University , explores this issue. Faculty Bio: Naomi S. Baron is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at American University in Washington, DC. She is a Stanford PhD and has been a Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Fellow, and Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Author of eleven books, she has done research in a wide swath of areas, including child language acquisition, the history of English, writing as a form of linguistic representation, reading, and artificial intelligence. The emergence of email, mobile phones, and social media led her to explore how online and mobile communication reshape our linguistic interactions (Alphabet to Email, 2000, and Always On, 2008). Two subsequent books (Words Onscreen, 2015, and How We Read Now, 2021) drew on her empirical studies of how users view print versus digital screens as reading media.More recently, Professor Baron has focused on the ways in which artificial intelligence is reshaping what it means to write and read. Who Wrote This? (2023) broached the challenges we face when AI becomes our writing or editing surrogate. Her new book, Reader Bot (2026), takes on the complementary issue of outsourcing human reading to a large language model. Transcripts: Since writing first emerged roughly 5,000 years ago, motivations for reading have proliferated. From legal declarations to religious creeds, epic poems to novels, research articles to emails, the texts we read invite us to connect with the words and thoughts of others. Today, humans aren’t the only ones reading. As large language models (LLMs) permeate our lives, we increasingly lean on them to read on our behalf. AI-as-read…