> Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.)

Has the author read A Clockwork Orange? It is filled with made-up "slang" that's basically just Russian. Needing some help to understand that is totally reasonable to me -- I definitely looked up a bunch of the words when I read it!

Yeah, this is definitely a massive slight. If it was any other book I'd buy it, but when you read terms like "horrorshow," or "platty", or "droogs" in the first few paragraphs it's not hard to see why one would look up words.

Also who describes "A Clockwork Orange" as old english?

There has to be a phrase for journalists that a conclusion ready in hand but their work is just finding scant/nonexistent evidence proving such a conclusion.

Something like "parallel construction" for law enforcement.

Wow. That went over the heads of both a Harvard student and an Atlantic journalist.