He counted on his fingers – three, six – but his hands were shaking so badly I wouldn’t have trusted him with a deck of cards. I told him to calm down. Told him we were going to fight. He looked at me like a man who’d been promised the moon and handed a bullet.
“Are you ready to die?” I asked. “I’ll die if you tell me to, master.” “Good answer. Wrong, but good.”
I fetched the rum from the cellar – the only currency still worth anything on this damned scrap of land – and poured him a drink. Then we got to work on the weapons. Two hunting guns, four muskets, a pair of pistols. I loaded each barrel with the care of an accountant balancing the books: buckshot, lead balls, a couple of scraps of metal for good measure. I gave Friday the axe. Kept the cutlass for myself – an old friend who’d never let me down, unlike people.
Recently, in good company, we got talking about AI, including whether it can be creative. I don’t know whether a model can come up with a truly original plot from scratch. And what does original even mean? Literary scholars have long debated whether all of literature boils down to a handful of basic plots: the homecoming, as in the Odyssey, or the quest, as in the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece.
AI models are already good at recommending and summarizing books. What’s less widely known is how useful they can be for restyling a text and tailoring the reading experience.
The passage at the top is from Robinson Crusoe, reimagined as if it had been written by Raymond Chandler, the master of American noir detective fiction. I sometimes reread chapter 20 in this version: after a fair amount of experimenting, I’m that pleased with how it turned out. Reading the whole of Robinson’s life and surprising adventures this way, though, is probably an acquired taste. But go beyond a simple change of style and something much more interesting opens up: hyperpersonalized reading. AI lets you choose how, exactly, you want to read a book.
I’ve been experimenting with AI as my personal book editor for a while. Here are the options I find especially useful:
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Something between the full text and a summary. Ever since childhood, I’ve skipped the padding: descriptions of scenery and interiors, scenes that drag on. You can specify in advance what to cut entirely, what to shorten, and what to keep in full – all the dialogue, for instance, or every practical example. The model does a great job of cutting what doesn’t interest me personally, keeping the substance and momentum without reducing the book to a dry little summary.
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Summaries at different levels of detail. A useful approach for nonfiction: start with a one- or two-page overview, then expand it into roughly ten pages of detailed notes, digging into the chapters that caught your interest.
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Bilingual reading with cultural context. A paragraph in English, followed by its Russian translation. Footnotes explain local references, such as “the winner of the fifth season of The Apprentice,” or things the author mentions in passing that the intended audience would recognize. That’s simply how I like it.
The next logical step for ebook services such as LitRes or Bookmate, it seems to me, is to reach agreements with rights holders and put these controls right in the app: “shorten to 150 pages, remove descriptions of scenery, keep all the case studies.” For now, I put it all together myself using a combination of models. The only downside is a nagging suspicion: did the AI throw out some important baby with the bathwater?
P.S. Somewhat embarrassingly, I only found out at 45 that Robinson Crusoe, which I must have reread twenty times as a child, has a second and a third volume. In the second, Crusoe even makes it to Russia, traveling from China all the way across Siberia. The third is a collection of moral and religious reflections in Crusoe’s voice. In my opinion, neither comes close to the first.
But here’s something relevant to this post. It turns out that many of Crusoe’s religious reflections were omitted from Korney Chukovsky’s Russian retelling. They didn’t fit the times. So adapting a book for its readers is hardly a new idea. Previously, the translator did it; now we can tailor the text ourselves.