If someone thought Chat GPT, giving them 5 paragraphs in a handful of seconds on what Postman might have said, is a substitute for reading Postman's original texts and doing their own critical thinking to come to their own conclusion?

Sounds a hell of a lot like television depth-wise and critical-thinking-replacement-wise to me. An appeal to the quality of the alternative-to-doing-your-own-research-and-thinking doesn't sound like something that would resonate.

You got it backwards: reading books is a lot more like television than interacting with GPT-4. Why do you assume one would apply more critical thinking when reading Postman's original texts than when reading GPT-4 writings about them? I'm starting to think you haven't spent much time with GPT-4. The quality is the key here.

It's the difference between wanting an easy answer to a question and wanting information to process on your own. You would have to apply critical thinking when reading Postman's texts to know what he might think about GPT-4 because he never actually wrote about it directly.

The prompt here wasn't something like "give me summaries of Postman's writings so that I can draw my own conclusions about what he would think," it was "tell me what to believe." It's the action and approach that matters.

Ok, sure, but how is this different from talking to humans?

I don't think Postman would've had much patience for the person who says "I heard it from a dude in a bar so it has to be true" either...

How about: “I discussed this with Neil Postman, and he believes that <…>”?