Romania's education system is failing to bring new readers into the book market, turning reading into a luxury, while artificial intelligence tools are making unlawful use of writers' works and facilitating information manipulation, Romanian Publishers Association (AER) director Mihai Mitrica said on Thursday in Targu Mures.
According to the AER director, the decline in readership is primarily driven not by financial factors but by shortcomings in the education system, which leave young people vulnerable to fake news.
"First of all, reading is becoming a luxury because the audience is shrinking, and it is shrinking not so much for economic reasons, although these are important, but because of poor performance in education. In any normal book market, it is the education system that supplies the book market with readers every year, through graduates of the various levels of education - lower secondary, upper secondary or higher education. In Romania, however, as all the impartial assessments tell us, namely those conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), we have a major problem with the ability of 15-year-olds to understand printed words presented as text in a book. In other words, they do not acquire at school the basic ability to read and understand what they are reading. This means they start out in life with a major disadvantage and most of them become almost certain prey to the manipulation that, as we can already see, dominates the information landscape. I believe there is more fake news than real news available to us," Mihai Mitrica said at the Bookfest Book Fair in Targu Mures.
Turning to the rise of new technologies, the AER director was critical of large language models (LLMs), accusing them of intellectual property theft and of amplifying online disinformation.
"Artificial intelligence is first and foremost a thief, because these automated information-compilation engines are built on books by human authors that have been scanned without permission and are being used without permission to feed these large language models, which everyone now sees as the great successes of the future. It is true that they can be useful tools, and often are useful tools. But they are also used to create much of the misleading content circulating on social media, which merely diverts people's attention from what should really concern them, namely the major issues. Look at the very dangerous times we are living through, when every day something new happens that is increasingly serious compared with what we expected the normal course of events to be," the publishers' representative said.
Mitrica believes that the lack of critical thinking developed through reading exposes people to significant risks both personally and at the broader societal level.
"People who are not prepared to approach these new situations with critical thinking very easily fall prey to manipulators and charlatans of all kinds. They can lose their own money, but above all they can lose the future of the country they live in," the AER director warned.
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