New Kindle Feature Uses AI To Answer Questions About Books - And Authors Can't Opt Out (reactormag.com) 41
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon has quietly added a new AI feature to its Kindle iOS app -- a feature that "lets you ask questions about the book you're reading and receive spoiler-free answers," according to an Amazon announcement.
The company says the feature, which is called Ask this Book, serves as "your expert reading assistant, instantly answering questions about plot details, character relationships, and thematic elements without disrupting your reading flow."
Publishing industry resource Publishers Lunch noticed Ask this Book earlier this week, and asked Amazon about it. Amazon spokesperson Ale Iraheta told PubLunch, "The feature uses technology, including AI, to provide instant, spoiler-free answers to customers' questions about what they're reading. Ask this Book provides short answers based on factual information about the book which are accessible only to readers who have purchased or borrowed the book and are non-shareable and non-copyable."
As PubLunch summed up: "In other words, speaking plainly, it's an in-book chatbot." [...] Perhaps most alarmingly, the Amazon spokesperson said, "To ensure a consistent reading experience, the feature is always on, and there is no option for authors or publishers to opt titles out."
The company says the feature, which is called Ask this Book, serves as "your expert reading assistant, instantly answering questions about plot details, character relationships, and thematic elements without disrupting your reading flow."
Publishing industry resource Publishers Lunch noticed Ask this Book earlier this week, and asked Amazon about it. Amazon spokesperson Ale Iraheta told PubLunch, "The feature uses technology, including AI, to provide instant, spoiler-free answers to customers' questions about what they're reading. Ask this Book provides short answers based on factual information about the book which are accessible only to readers who have purchased or borrowed the book and are non-shareable and non-copyable."
As PubLunch summed up: "In other words, speaking plainly, it's an in-book chatbot." [...] Perhaps most alarmingly, the Amazon spokesperson said, "To ensure a consistent reading experience, the feature is always on, and there is no option for authors or publishers to opt titles out."
"AI sucks, how can we make people pay for it" (Score:2, Insightful)
Welcome to the tech monopoly.
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Sure, but I guess they want money because the AI has to READ the book before giving answers.
They'd sue us all if they could prove that we lend the book to every single family member and even (gasp) strangers!
Some even donate them or put them on shelves in cafés after having read them
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My browser has read your post before rendering it. Putting it through an AI does the same as my browser does. It uses it as input, does some fancy processing and gives me an output. The browser takes the bytes and renders them into truetype letters, the AI can for example summarize it. In the end are both processing the input to give an output created from the original content.
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You really don't want to use that argument. The next step, and some publishers are already trying, is to argue that people may not use browsers with adblock as they "modify their content".
No matter if you use Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or dare to use old Internet Explorer, if you have installed adblock, read the content with curl, or pipe it into an AI for a summary, all of these are valid clients to consume the content.
You consent or not to distributing it (usually just by publishing it or keeping it to yours
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because the AI has to READ the book
You're going to have to decide if AI has agency, or is just a tool used by a person. You can't have it both ways.
AI has many uses (Score:2)
Today's AI is useful for some things, tomorrow's AI will be useful for more.
Unfortunately, AI is the fad of the day, and marketoids are rushing to cram immature AI into anything they can imagine.
While it's plausible that some of these ideas will be useful, most are annoying slop and worse.
If something is good, people choose it voluntarily and even pay for it.
If something is impossible to turn off, it's most likely not good
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If something is impossible to turn off, it's most likely not good
This is a chat bot that answers questions about books.
Turning it off is merely not using it.
A better example of what you're complaining about is Google's AI shitpost at the top of every query.
This isn't it.
Frankly, this kind of thing is going to have huge adoption. It's precisely the kind of shit that people are using AI for right now.
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Better yet, is there currently a browser that can answer questions about a webpage?
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Absent that, if it is (as suspected) just a chat box for an LLM fine-tuned to RAG the material well, then ya- it's as simple as not using it.
Google's sin is taking a query that wasn't meant for an LLM, and giving it to an LLM whether or not you want it to.
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This is why I think a severe AI market crash might actually be good for AI. We've proven LLMs can be impressive, and occasionally even useful. Now, we just need the marketing people and CEO suite to fuck off and send it back into the labs for another decade or two to work on the more impressive stuff. And let the ethicists and policy wonks have a decade or so to get us ready for it so it doesnt dismantle civil society, the economy, and politics as insane silicon valley loons torch the forests and redirect h
So fun fact about Amazon (Score:4, Interesting)
If we had proper antitrust law enforcement someone would have noticed ages ago that Amazon was going around buying up competitors and shut that down but well, we don't.
So now we've got a handful of retailers and they are all basically owned by the same handful of major shareholders so they all have the same prices and those prices keep going up because good luck starting a competing retailer.
Welcome to the second Robber Baron Era (Score:2)
New and improved! Now with 21st century anarcho-capitalism in every bite.
I don't know what we do anymore (Score:2)
On the other hand voters simply will not tolerate socialism. If you've ever had a co-worker that won't pull their own weight and felt resentment that's why. The idea of somebody who isn't working being allowed to have anything is really upsetting to a lot of people.
We
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The third option is.....labor automation!
Walk with me on this....
Humans have been exploiting and oppressing each other since before recorded history. And this has been true in very capitalist economies as well as very communist ones. It's basically a universal truth. Furthermore, it was way, way worse in the past.
What changed? Has humanity become more moral in the past few thousand years. I find that very, very unlikely and not well supported by evidence. But tech level has changed tremendously in the
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The way they got so big wasn't that they were super efficient
Joke used to be that they lost money on every sale but made up for it in volume. Turns out it's easy to beat competitors if you're not constrained by needing to make money.
Anyhow, it's been interesting to see Amazon's repeated forays into groceries in the UK. I remember the first launch with great fanfare and press releases about how amazingly efficient they were with their cunning algorithms and amazingly logistics etc etc an they the flamed out
Sorry, but the right to read is fundamental (Score:2, Troll)
Pretending publishers/authors should have some fundamental right to restrict what you do with the knowledge in their books is asinine. They themselves took the alphabet from somewhere (phoenicians), tooks the tropes they use developed over time (check out tvtropes.org), etc etc etc. Imagine if a math book author demands royalties for doing math in your head... even though they really didn't come up with anything novel.
The only thing you ensure if publishers/authors can restrict AI is that your country/reg
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Indeed, what's next, suing the bookshop employees who put a little note on the shelves about how they liked it?
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Yep, this is the first sale doctrine. If I buy it, I can do what I want with it.
Though readers can't buy from Kindle, only rent. But I assume the principle would still apply if it were ever tested.
I like used book stores (Score:2)
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That's odd. I need large fonts, but I find dark mode unreadable. Black on cream or light beige is about ideal.
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I like them too, family even is an antique book dealer. But.. I am allergic to a lot of old books. And now I need bigger print and more interested in new books with option to find old ones. So even though it has drawbacks, my kindle PaperWhite has some killer features: big text, instant purchase, and kindle unlimited. Big e-ink tablet (Daylight Computer DC-1) is also useful. The AI feature? Haven't seen it yet but people who buy cliff notes or my family member who had to give a talk about a difficult book t
The curtains were f*cking blue (Score:2)
This will bring a new perspective on the "What the author meant vs what the English Teacher thinks the author meant" meme.
Why should they can opt out? (Score:4, Insightful)
If I buy a book, the authors also can't opt out of me using it as a doorstop or doing other things with it they didn't intend me to do. I would be more worried if authors could deny me certain uses after I bought a book.
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I stop an edoor with it.
This is kind of obvious (Score:2)
I kinda love this (Score:2)
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Can it read the book to me, instead of making me buy the audio book?
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So yeah, it can, but it most likely won't.
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This seems like a market opportunity.
Amazon started out by just selling books. They just bought them wholesale like every other bookstore. As they gained market share, more publishers and authors wanted their books on Amazon's site.
It would be great if a startup decided to use AI to read audio books. The first takers would be smaller publishers and authors who wanted exposure, plus classic literature that's out of copyright. If they could gain enough momentum, they might be able to start getting more popula
So what? (Score:2)
Copyright? It's my book, I can feed it to a program if I want to.
For factual books, the potential usefulness is obvious. But even for fiction - sometimes you forget who a character is, or what exactly happened x chapters ago.
Honestly not seeing the problem here...
Amazon the pirate (Score:1)
This is not the first Amazon move that pushes authors and publishers off the platform. They WILL make money, but they also push people to other services (like Goodreads, etc.) for e-books. I want e-books uncorrupted by AI directly or indirectly, and that LLM scanners have not "slurped up".
I am sure I am NOT the only one.