The Secret AI Skill You Already Have (If You Read Literature)
Why your English class was actually preparing you for the AI age
A few weeks ago,
brilliantly demonstrated how AI interaction mirrors the craft of fiction writing—showing us that effective prompting draws on character development, scene setting, and narrative construction techniques that creative writers have refined for centuries.Today's piece extends that insight by revealing an even deeper connection: the cognitive architecture that enables sophisticated literary reading—what we call "double reading"—provides the foundational mental flexibility required for strategic AI collaboration.
While Kentz focused on the creative writing skills needed to construct effective prompts, this analysis complicates that framework by examining the critical reading skills necessary to evaluate and engage with AI outputs. Together, these perspectives suggest that literature education isn't just relevant to AI literacy—it's essential, training both the creative authoring abilities and the dual awareness that effective human-AI partnership demands.
Here's something that might surprise you: if you've ever gotten lost in a great novel while simultaneously analyzing how the author manipulates your emotions, you already possess one of the most crucial skills for working with AI.
The Cognitive Juggling Act
Think about the last time you read a compelling piece of fiction. Maybe it was The Great Gatsby or Beloved. Something fascinating happened in your brain during that experience—you were doing two contradictory things at once.
On one level, you believed in the story completely. You cared about the characters, felt genuine emotions about their fates, and experienced the fictional world as if it were real. But simultaneously, you maintained awareness that this was all constructed—that an author had deliberately crafted every scene, manipulated every emotion, and chosen every word for specific effects.
This mental juggling act—holding both belief and skepticism in productive tension—is what literature scholars call "double reading." And it turns out this same cognitive flexibility is exactly what you need for effective AI collaboration.
The Parallel Process
When you work with ChatGPT or Claude, you're doing something remarkably similar. You engage seriously with the AI's suggestions, build on its ideas, and experience genuine collaboration. But you also maintain awareness that you're working with pattern recognition rather than understanding—that your "partner" lacks consciousness but can still provide valuable input.
In my experience, students who excel at analyzing complex literature consistently show greater facility with strategic AI use. They adapt more quickly to the cognitive demands of dual awareness and exhibit more sophisticated strategies for maintaining engagement while preserving critical judgment.
Why This Matters Now
This connection reveals something important: literature classrooms are already teaching AI literacy skills, even when instructors don't realize it. Every time students learn to work with unreliable narrators in books like The Remains of the Day, they're developing the same critical evaluation skills needed for assessing AI outputs.
When students analyze how Morrison layers temporal perspectives or how Nabokov manipulates reader sympathy, they're building capacities directly transferable to understanding AI's pattern-based generation. The ability to appreciate literary craft while remaining aware of its constructed nature becomes the ability to engage with AI outputs while understanding their algorithmic origins.
For more insights into the double reading in the literary and narrative context, check out Peter Rabinowitz’s foundation article on the topic.
Practical Applications
This insight transforms how we might approach both literary and technological education:
For Literature Teachers: You're not being displaced by AI—you're uniquely qualified to teach the dual awareness that effective human-AI collaboration requires. Your expertise in developing cognitive flexibility and managing textual complexity transfers directly to AI literacy instruction.
For Students: That challenging English class isn't just about cultural knowledge—it's cognitive preparation for technological partnership. The mental flexibility you develop navigating complex fictional worlds becomes the foundation for effective AI collaboration.
For Educators Generally: Literature education emerges as technologically essential rather than culturally optional. Institutions that strengthen rather than diminish literary instruction may better prepare students for AI collaboration.
The Bigger Picture
In an AI-dominated world, we often assume that technical skills matter most. But this research suggests something different: the cognitive flexibility that sophisticated reading develops—the ability to hold contradictory positions simultaneously, to engage authentically while maintaining analytical distance—becomes a fundamental literacy for navigating a world populated by artificial agents.
The double reading that characterizes both sophisticated fictional engagement and strategic AI interaction isn't just an academic concept. It's a practical skill that determines whether you'll be overwhelmed by AI or empowered by it.
What This Means for You
If you've ever found yourself simultaneously absorbed in a story and impressed by an author's technique, you already have the cognitive architecture for effective AI collaboration. That ability to believe and analyze simultaneously, to engage genuinely while maintaining critical awareness, is your secret weapon in the AI age.
The path forward isn't about choosing between human and artificial intelligence—it's about developing the dual awareness that makes productive partnership possible. And literature, it turns out, has been teaching us this skill all along.
What's your experience with this "double reading" phenomenon? Have you noticed connections between your literary analysis skills and your AI interactions? Reply and let us know—we'd love to hear your perspective.
Nick Potkalitsky, Ph.D.
Check out some of our favorite Substacks:
Mike Kentz’s AI EduPathways: Insights from one of our most insightful, creative, and eloquent AI educators in the business!!!
Terry Underwood’s Learning to Read, Reading to Learn: The most penetrating investigation of the intersections between compositional theory, literacy studies, and AI on the internet!!!
Suzi’s When Life Gives You AI: A cutting-edge exploration of the intersection among computer science, neuroscience, and philosophy
Alejandro Piad Morffis’s The Computerist Journal: Unmatched investigations into coding, machine learning, computational theory, and practical AI applications
Michael Woudenberg’s Polymathic Being: Polymathic wisdom brought to you every Sunday morning with your first cup of coffee
Rob Nelson’s AI Log: Incredibly deep and insightful essay about AI’s impact on higher ed, society, and culture.
Michael Spencer’s AI Supremacy: The most comprehensive and current analysis of AI news and trends, featuring numerous intriguing guest posts
Daniel Bashir’s The Gradient Podcast: The top interviews with leading AI experts, researchers, developers, and linguists.
Daniel Nest’s Why Try AI?: The most amazing updates on AI tools and techniques
Jason Gulya’s The AI Edventure: An important exploration of cutting-edge innovations in AI-responsive curriculum and pedagogy.
"That ability to believe and analyze simultaneously, to engage genuinely while maintaining critical awareness, is your secret weapon in the AI age": so much no.
If AI use requires a secret weapon AT ALL, what are we talking about?
In my personal life, I spend most of my time with individuals whose lives are deeply influenced by one disability or another: autism, Down's syndrome, sensory processing disorders, and so on. Many of these people (my adult daughter and her large, interlocking circles of friends) are utterly overwhelmed by YouTube and social media, if they're able to access it at all, because they don't have access to those things you're saying are essential for AI use: simultaneous belief and analysis, engagement and critical awareness, at least not in the degrees you're talking about as essential for AI use. They're bright in their own ways, but their own ways don't mean their strengths lie in curating social media algorithms.
And AI will be worse for them, based on how you're describing it. There are other ways to describe it, but tell me what outcomes you're expecting for these folks under AI.
In my professional life, I'm a teacher (literature, communications, environmental humanities), and my goal is to support students as they build skills in precisely those four areas listed in the sentence I've pulled out. If ALREADY having those skills is the necessary "secret weapon" for effective AI use, then students by definition don't have the secret weapon and therefore shouldn't have unfettered access.
One concern with the model having to do with intentionality. Tell me where I’m wrong. Bot interactions would be like reading fiction where the “author” (the bot learned to become an author through the training process) had no specific audience in mind in fact had no mind at all - just statistical patterns. This explains why bot responses can feel simultaneously helpful and hollow. There’s nobody on the other end of the line. Users who oscillate between treating bot outputs as meaningful communication of any sort written by a human (fiction, sermon, poem) vs. pattern matching, without human authorial invitations to imaginatively take up an appropriate audience posture, risk objectively processing synthetic output (no rhetorical audience involved in its production). It good be that there is no relationship between what you report anecdotally, i.e., being a good literary reader is correlated with being more of an expert analyst of aesthetic text. We would need evidence of that correlation first.