When a flatterer An email came inviting me to join an AI company called Rebind that I later thought would radically transform the way book lovers read books, I was pretty sure it was a scam. For one thing, the sender was Clancy Martin, a writer and philosophy professor whom I didn’t know personally but vaguely remembered writing about his wasted youth as a small-time jewelry con artist, also being a serial liar in his love life. . On the other hand, they offered to pay me. “Clancy up to his old ways!” I thought
My role, the email explained, would involve recording original commentary on a “big book,” Clancy suggested. Romeo and Julietalthough it could be any classic in the public domain. This feedback would somehow be embedded in the text and made interactive: readers could ask questions and AI-me would have an “ongoing conversation” with them about the book. We would be reading friends. proposing to me Romeo and Juliet I found it subversively funny: my “experience” in romantic tragedy consists of having once written a somewhat controversial anti-marriage polemic entitled Against Love. I’ve also written, somewhat ironically, about the confusion of sexual consent codes, which I assumed might be relevant. Julieta, after all, was only 13 years old. These days, Romeo (probably around 16, they don’t tell us precisely) would risk being called a predator.
Apparently, a group of decidedly illustrious participants, known as “Rebinders”, had already signed up: Irish Booker Prize winner John Banville to James Joyce. Dubliners, bestselling author Roxane Gay at Edith Wharton’s The age of innocencealso Bill McKibben, Elaine Pagels, Garth Greenwell… And coming into left field, Lena Dunham at EM Forster’s A room with a view, a peculiar perspective.
Clancy further explained that someone named John Dubuque, who had sold a business for “millions and millions of dollars,” had come up with the idea for this venture after spending several months working with the notoriously difficult philosopher Martin Heidegger. Being and Time with a tutor His hope, Clancy said, was to make this kind of one-on-one (admittedly expensive) reading experience available to everyone. I googled John Dubuque. Nothing came up. How do you sell a company for billions without leaving a trace? My scam antennae vibrated again. I thought he would next ask me to invest in the company, probably in the form of Apple gift cards.
I agreed to a phone call with Clancy, and shortly after the greeting, I asked for more details about Dubuque, who I wasn’t sure really existed. “Sounds a bit Gatsbyish,” I said, gently veiling my skepticism in a literary allusion. Clancy claimed to have met him, a “wonderful man” from the Midwest, a very nice guy, and then got to work. If I were to start, Rebind would first record a handful of short videos of me chatting about the work, any aspect that interested me; these would be embedded in various places throughout the text. And then me and an interlocutor (probably Clancy), known internally as “Ghostbinder”, would record 12 (or more!) hours of conversation; these would be used as the basis for AI-Laura’s comments. The conversation could be about Romeo and Juliet but also related topics: Is love at first sight reliable? Is 13 too young to marry? The content was entirely up to me – my job was not to be a Shakespeare expert, but to be interesting. As Rebind users read the work, chat windows would open in which they would write journal-type responses, to which AI-Laura would respond, drawing on and remixing the recordings she had made.
Even if it was technically viable and Dubuque was legit, did he really want to be a part of it? I have all the usual concerns about artificial intelligence: that it will mark the end of human history; that under the hood is a charming sociopath trying to get tech journalists to dump their wives; that even its inventors do not understand how it works; that he is so ruthlessly intelligent that we will soon be working for him believing that he is working for us.
