Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the educational landscape, making it easier than ever for students to spend less time reading and thinking critically. CliffsNotes have been available for decades, and more recently, SparkNotes has created online resources that allow students to skip essential readings in favor of summaries of well-known texts. Today, students can utilize large language models (LLMs) to quickly generate personalized, detailed essays on nearly any assigned text in just seconds. This provides them with unprecedented access to information without ever needing to read the original material.
Engineering Management and Systems Engineering (EMSE) Professor David Broniatowski argues that this shift jeopardizes long-standing academic and cultural foundations: fostering scholarship and community through reading and discussing texts.
Prof. Broniatowski was recently honored with the inaugural 2026-2027 Academic Fellowship of the Institute of Jewish Spirituality and Society (IJSS). The fellowship brings together a cohort of scholars from across disciplines to explore the theme “Reading as a Cultural Practice,” examining how people create meaning across texts, digital environments, classrooms, public life, and other contexts.
Broniatowski was inspired to see that the application explicitly mentioned the role of reading in AI and ethics, a topic he recently touched on in his EMSE doctoral seminar.
“I had just taught a doctoral seminar, in which I asked students to read several papers on their own. They were welcome to upload the paper to an LLM and chat with it about the paper, but they couldn’t substitute reading with the work of an LLM,” Broniatowski explained.
“The key to the seminar was community, and getting students to build community and scholarship around reading these papers and talking about them. This fellowship stood out to me as a good opportunity to expand on this theme,” he said.
Broniatowski credits his Jewish background for instilling in him the idea that reading and learning are active, collaborative activities.
“I come from a background where you argue and debate sources with a friend, and walk away still friends. Arguing is not a bad thing; it’s about looking at it from a lot of perspectives and getting to the truth, and in its best form, that’s what academia and peer review are about,” he explained.
Through the yearlong fellowship, he hopes to continue building community and learning new ideas for engaging with other scholars. “This fellowship allows us to have these discussions in an environment that goes beyond the traditional academic paper,” he said.
Broniatowski, an expert in AI, emphasizes that we should think of language models and agents as tools or consultants to supplement our own reading, critical thinking, and discourse.
“There’s a bit of a moral panic going around right now on the use of language models. Just because someone used a language model does not mean what they say is right or wrong, it just means that they used a tool,” he said.
As an engineer, he recognizes that he hails from a discipline that likes to automate processes and prides itself on rational, objective analysis.
“We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there are people building things that are meant to serve other people. This is an opportunity to bring that human-centered perspective to the AI ethics conversation, and inform some of the research with forms of knowledge that are not traditionally reflected in engineering,” he concluded.