Premium: 6/30/2024
The 33 Project
Good morning! It’s Sunday and we’re moving about as slowly as you can move. Where I’d rather be, frankly:
Anyway, have some fun reads and recs for you this weekend. Let’s dive in:
1/ Fascinating piece on Rebind, a new program that combines reading and an AI companion, inputted by a real writer, to enhance the experience. I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again.
Even if it was technically feasible and Dubuque was legit, did I really want to be involved in this? I have all the usual anxieties about AI—that it will usher in the end of human history; that under the hood it’s a charming sociopath who tries to get tech reporters to ditch their wives; that even its inventors don’t understand how it works; that it’s so ruthlessly intelligent we’ll soon be working for it while believing it’s working for us.
Is this the future of reading?
Dubuque emphasized that users will have to realize that Rebind isn’t an “Ask Me Anything” experience, though he figures, as with ChatGPT, people will initially want to test its limits, try to “break it.”
Which is exactly what I did when I got access to a beta version of the app and clicked on The Great Gatsby, with New York Times journalist Peter Catapano as the Rebinder. “Was Gatsby just a rich jerk?” I asked AI-Catapano: “Gatsby’s character is complex and multidimensional, not easily reduced to the label of a ‘rich jerk,’” he (it?) chided me. “In fact, Gatsby also enters the book as a very soft-spoken and rather humble-seeming person. He’s perhaps flashy with his home, his parties, and his belongings but seems relatively subdued in his appearance and manner of speaking.” The cadences were slightly stiff—Dubuque said that as the models get faster and smarter, the responses are getting more creative and conversational—but having my admittedly dumb question pondered seriously in real time did feel engaging, and made me want to keep reading and chatting.
(Use 12ft.io to read without a paywall)