Steven Kurutz, Now You Can Read the Classics With A.I.-Powered Expert Guides, NYTimes, June 13, 2024. The article opens:
For the past year, two philosophy professors have been calling around to prominent authors and public intellectuals with an unusual, perhaps heretical, proposal. They have been asking these thinkers if, for a handsome fee, they wouldn’t mind turning themselves into A.I. chatbots.
John Kaag, one of the academics, is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is known for writing books, such as “Hiking With Nietzsche” and “American Philosophy: A Love Story,” that blend philosophy and memoir.
Clancy Martin, Mr. Kaag’s partner in the endeavor, is a professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City and the author of 10 books, including “How Not to Kill Yourself,” an unflinching memoir about his mental health struggles and 10 suicide attempts.
They met, became friends, and then...
In April 2023, Mr. Kaag received an email from John Dubuque, a businessman who had become a patron of sorts.
Before joining his family’s plumbing-supply business in St. Louis, Mr. Dubuque had been a philosophy major at the University of Southern California. Feeling that he was stagnating intellectually, he began paying philosophy professors to take him through “Being and Time” by Martin Heidegger and other works.
Mr. Dubuque, 40, hired Mr. Kaag for a six-week tutorial on “The Varieties of Religious Experience” by William James. [...] At the time, Mr. Dubuque’s family business had recently been sold, and he was looking for what to do next. During his talks with Mr. Kaag, he suggested that they team up to create a publishing company.
As Mr. Dubuque envisioned it, the imprint would pair a world-class expert with a classic work and use technology similar to ChatGPT to replicate the dialogue between a student and teacher. In theory, readers could ask, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin about presidential speeches or delve into Buddhist texts with Deepak Chopra.
Mr. Kaag jumped on board and brought his friend Mr. Martin to the project. The result is Rebind Publishing.
This reminds me of an old TV series by the multifaceted entertainer Steve Allen called Meeting of Minds, which ran on PBS from 1977 to 1981: "The show featured actors playing historical figures, but in a talk-show format. Guests would interact with each other and host Steve Allen, discussing philosophy, religion, history, science, and many other topics."
The Times article is not very clear about how it works and the five minutes I spent on the Rebind website didn't clarify things very much. The idea seems to be that the expert readers will have their voices cloned and their ideas about the book will be precipitated into an AI so that the reader can then have a real-time virtual conversation with the expert reader. So, they've got Laura Kipnis on Romeo and Juliet, Depak Chopra on various Buddhist texts, Doris Kearns Goodwin on six presidential speeches, Margaret Atwood on A Tale of Two Cities, and others.
I should also note that Tyler Cowen has provided AI enhancements for his recent book: GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? You can use those enhancements (for ChatGPT, GPT-4, or Claude) to "converse" with the book, in effect with Tyler, on economics.
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August 19, 2024: More on Rebind: I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again, Wired, June 18, 2024.
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