Amazon’s virtual shelves already feature books written by artificial intelligence. One startup believes that even titles written by humans would benefit from some AI, in the form of an accompanying chatbot primed to talk about a book’s contents.
YouAI, a startup that offers tools for building AI apps, recently developed an app it calls Book AI, which promises to “turn any book into an AI.” It spins up a chatbot that knows everything about the book and can talk about it endlessly—like a bespectacled Terminator that just dropped in on your book club meeting.
Dmitry Shapiro, YouAI’s CEO, says he’s talking with a number of publishers large and small about creating chatbots to accompany new releases. Solution Tree, which offers thousands of books on continuing education, already plans to offer what Shapiro calls “conversational companions” to go with its titles.
A chatbot edition can be especially useful for textbooks because users may have specific questions or need things clarified, Shapiro says. And because the large language model behind the chatbot has, like ChatGPT and others, been trained on a wide range of other content, sometimes it can even put what is described in a book into action. Shapiro gives the example of asking the chatbot for a book on website optimization to suggest a design putting the key points into practice.
YouAI creates its book bots using a method known as retrieval augmented generation, or RAG, that makes chatbots hew to specific source material. The same technique is used by search engines to keep search chatbots focused on real information and to prevent them from “hallucinating” their results.
I tried uploading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to YouAI’s app to see how it works. It seemed a fitting test given current sentiments and concerns about AI, and with Halloween just a week away.
The Franken-bot did a decent job summarizing the book and its themes. It also saw some interesting parallels between the classic tale of scientific hubris and todays’ worries over an AI apocalypse—something it could riff on likely because its training data also included more recent content that mentions the book.
“Frankenstein is warned against playing God and creating life, which leads to disastrous consequences. Similarly, some argue humans should not try to ‘play God’ by creating sentient AI,” the chatbot said. “Frankenstein quickly loses control over his creature, which becomes violent and destructive. There are concerns AI could become uncontrollable and cause harm if not properly constrained.”
Not bad, although it might also have noted that just as Frankenstein served as a rather dramatic, ahem, lightning rod for angst about scientific progress back in the early 1800s, today’s headlines can often hue toward runaway nightmare scenarios to the exclusion of actual day-to-day risks posed by AI.
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