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Annual Reading Promoters Conference
Workshop-Talk: “Does the algorithm dream of electric verses?”
Annual Reading Promoters Conference
Workshop-Talk: “Does the algorithm dream of electric verses?”
An algorithm can describe a lump in the throat, but it has no idea what that actually means. It can process millions of words without pause, recite—from memory—the most beautiful stories without its voice faltering, and yet it is incapable of trembling at a haiku or beating in time with a sonnet. The emotion and pleasure of reading remain distinctly human territory.
In this talk, Jorge Gonzalvo—recipient of Spain’s 2022 National Reading Promotion Award—invites us to reflect on the use of AI to foster reading, but also on how to maintain critical thinking, combat various biases, and decide when it is time to turn off the screen. Reading mediation professionals face new challenges related to AI: digital overexposure, scheduling disconnections to safeguard attention—our scarcest resource—and developing best practices that connect technology with ethics and well-being.
It is not only about knowing what AI can do, but also about deciding the role we wish to assign it. The algorithm is a powerful tool, an amplifier of imagination, but it is neither a replacement nor a substitute for the reading mediator. And that decision—how to read, how to guide, how to feel—remains, irrevocably, in our hands. After all, the capacity to dream—whether of sheep or electric verses—remains, exclusively, ours.
Participant: Jorge Gonzalvo
Wednesday, December 03
13:10 to 14:00