I don’t like AI much, but I’m fine with this. Note, I don’t buy books on Kindle. I just think it’s fine if you want to ask “who is this person again” or “what happened in this place?” There used to be digital books that were all hyperlinked up so you could do that anyway, but I guess it was too much work or people didn’t really use it enough to justify the work. Especially if the names are strange to you and you don’t know them — like high fantasy stuff.

I think it’s unreasonable to ask authors to provide this information as well when you can just have an AI sum it up. The problem occurs when the AI gets it wrong. Especially if you, in turn, want to blame the author. It needs to tell you this information is coming from the app, not the author, or the publisher, and that it can sometimes make mistakes.

Or, here’s another idea. Some authors write bibles (basically info dumps) but readers never see these. So what if they bundle that and the AI can reference that? The problem I see then is something like Game of Thrones, if you ask who Jon Snow is and it tells you he’s the son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark. (This was never confirmed in the books, but it was a popular fan theory. It was confirmed in the HBO series (like a decade ago) so it’s assumed that that was the author’s intent… so having a document full of the author’s notes could spoil you in other ways.)