The CEO of HarperCollins wants your books to talk to you. Not in the audiobook sense, but in the conversational sense. He wants to put the books atop a large language model, the kind of imitative AI that tells you to glue your cheese to your pizza so that you can hold a conversation with the “author” or the book. No wonder he wants his authors to sell their works to imitative AI companies.
The idea is dumb, of course. First, imitative AI’s have a bullshit problem that is unsurmountable. Using one of these hair-brained “talking books” is just as likely to teach you that Orwell loved him some communist party, the Austen thought the upper classes were hunky-dory, and that Dickens was bang alongside industrial exploitation. Imitative AI is just a word calculator. It cannot accurately portray an author’s real self consistently no matter how many words it’s been trained on.
Second, LLMs are expensive to run. It is reported that Microsoft loses twenty dollars a seat on their GtiHub CoPilot product. Training, storage, and compute time for these models are ridiculously high. There is no world in which these subsidies to use imitative AI continue indefinitely, and that means our little CEO buddy up there is eventually going to have a product no one can afford.
More importantly, books already talk. Anyone who recognized the absurdity of my examples in the paragraph above knows they were absurd in large part because of the books produced by those authors. You read the books, you thought about them, you came to a conclusion about their meaning. They stood on their own, telling a tale with it’s own meaning. You didn’t need to have them explained to you, to “talk” to the authors to figure out their importance to you. The books spoke for themselves. And even in those cases where deeper understanding enriched your experience, that understanding can only come from someone who can provide a proper context for the text, the author, and the world the author wrote in. Imitative AI systems have no model of the world and thus can provide none of that reliably.
Books do not need to be improved. Even my e-reader, which I am grateful for due to the amount of space it has saved in my home, is just a book. Text exists on a physical device, you read the text, then move onto the next collection of text, just like a book. These talking books would not only be misleading in many cases, but they would also suck one of the joys of reading away — ruminating on a good story.
If the CEO of HarperCollins wants books to make more money, maybe he ought to focus less on gimmicks and bullshit and more on producing more, and more varied, good books. It may not get seats next to the tech wannabe disruptors, but it would make your customers and shareholders happier.
Weekly Word Count
If you count planning and outlining, somewhere north of five thousand. If you count just words in the story itself, somewhere south of zero. I know which one I prefer you count ….