For The Love Of Reading In The Age
Source: Nick Potkalitsky Substack
Author: Nick Potkalitsky
Original source: https://nickpotkalitsky.substack.com/p/for-the-love-of-reading-in-the-age
Published: 2026-01-11
Source type: essay
Private backup: the full article text is archived in the private repository at archives/articles/nickpotkalitsky-substack-com-for-the-love-of-reading-in-the-age.source.md. It is not published on the public Quartz site.
Summary
Nick Potkalitsky reflects on recovering the capacity and desire to read physical, human-authored books after a period of exhaustion, transition, and heavy engagement with AI systems. Through novels centered on games, competition, mastery, failure, and performance, he distinguishes the imaginative and ethical grounding of literature from the adaptive possibility-generation of AI-generated text. The article argues that both literature and AI can produce surprise, possibility, and otherness, but human-authored literature offers a more locatable form of intentionality: a reader encounters traces of a specific human consciousness, moral universe, and aesthetic design.
Pull quotes
AI as Possibility Generator
“In my current thinking, AI is a carefully calibrated possibility generator.”
Human Texts Leave Traces
“When I’m deeply engaged in a human-authored text, I feel a sense of a moral and ethical universe that activates passing descriptions and character dialogue with powerful provocation”
Locatable Otherness
“With literature, the otherness is locatable and intentional.”
Distributed AI Otherness
“With AI, the otherness is distributed and emergent rather than locatable.”
Big ideas
Claims
Key evidence and examples
- Potkalitsky describes losing and then recovering the stamina for physical reading.
- He contrasts audiobooks with the particular discipline and solace of the physical page.
- He uses Kawabata’s The Master of Go as an example of literature as a mediated encounter with another human consciousness across time, culture, translation, and personal circumstance.
- He characterizes AI as a calibrated possibility generator whose outputs can be surprising, resonant, manipulative, or productive.
- He distinguishes AI-generated text as distributed and emergent rather than locatable in a specific authorial consciousness.
Education relevance
This article is relevant to AI literacy, English/language arts pedagogy, humanities education, and questions of authorship. It pushes AI literacy beyond plagiarism and productivity toward interpretation, ethical encounter, aesthetic experience, and the status of human-authored text.
Durability note
This remains durable as a humanities-centered account of why human-authored texts still matter in AI-saturated reading environments; the specific AI-system examples may date faster than the distinction between locatable literary otherness and distributed AI otherness.