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New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books

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Re: New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books

#61

Post by Rebelgecko »

catgary wrote: post #21
Mouvelie wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Amazon DID NOT answer PubLunch’s questions about “what rights the company was relying upon to execute the new feature was not answered, nor did they elaborate on the technical details of the service and any protections involved (whether to prevent against hallucinations, or to protect the text from AI training).”

You don’t need any rights to execute the feature. The user owns the book. The app lets the user feed the book into an LLM, as is absolutely their right, and asks questions.

1. The user doesn't own the book, the user has a revocable license to the book. Amazon has no qualms about taking away books that people have bought

2. I doubt the Kindle version of the LLM will run locally. Is Amazon repurposing the author-provided files, or will the users' device upload the text of the book?

Re: New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books

#62

Post by catgary »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #27
catgary wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need any rights to execute the feature. The user owns the book. The app lets the user feed the book into an LLM, as is absolutely their right, and asks questions.

>The app lets the user feed the book into an LLM, as is absolutely their right, I don't think that's cut and clear yet. Throwing media onto someone else's server may count as distribution.

Sure, in the sense that any belief about the law isn’t cut and dried until a judge has explicitly dismissed it in the court of law.

Re: New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books

#63

Post by lm28469 »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #12
Mouvelie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good lord, at this point just drone off in front of a Netflix show. How bad has it gotten that you even suggest that one can "forget what happened chapters earlier" ? This is not normal.

What kind of books are you reading? You're telling on yourself (and very arrogant about it).

It's more telling about the current state of affairs than the person who commented. Forgetting things is part of life, move on, we don't need daddy bezos sucking 1.21 gigawatts per request to tell you that some side character drunk a beer 12 chapters ago so you can enjoy the joke you just missed.

Re: New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books

#64

Post by ceejayoz »

stogot wrote: post #15

I’m looking forward to this. Especially reading old classics, or catching up on an old series and trying to figure out “is this character the sister or niece of the main protagonist? Outline their character development” I used to have to read fan wikis to figure this out. But it will especially be useful for all the textbooks I’ve bought years ago. Being able to ask it questions (to the content itself) is better than…

> I used to have to read fan wikis to figure this out.

I would much rather read a fan wiki than hope a LLM correctly understood a book's plot, at least with the current state-of-the-art of things.

Case in point: Amazon's own AI gets significant details of its own prestige TV show wrong:

https://gizmodo.com/fallout-ai-recap-prime-video-amazon-2000...

The Fallout fan wiki probably at least knows the Great War was in 2077.

Re: New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books

#65

Post by terafo »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #14
savanaly wrote: post #2

If they're not using the book text to train models (keeping the focus on this particular new Kindle feature), where's the room for objection? My device, my content, it's none of the author's business how I read it, in my view. Edit: Given I've been a reader of HN for some time, I am perfectly aware that on Kindle you don't own the content, just a license to the content. Don't need any more people pointing this out! L…

It's not training on books, but it will answer questions about the book you're reading. Doesn't pass the sniff test. >My device, my content I don't think you own the kindle store and servers used to train the Ai.

There are LLM's that can process 1 million token context window. Amazon Nova 2 for one, even though it's definitely not the highest quality model. You just put whole book in context and make LLM answer questions about it. And given the fact that domain is pretty limited, you can just store KV cache for most popular books on SSD, eliminating quite a bit of cost.

Re: New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books

#66

Post by nephihaha »

jeffbee wrote: post #39

I really don't understand why authors believe they have something to say about how I read their book.

They can't force you do anything, but a book or a piece of music etc, is often designed in a particular order so you get a particular effect.

You don't look up the end of a whodunnit before reading the beginning because that would make it kind of pointless.

Re: New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books

#67

Post by squigz »

nephihaha wrote: post #53
savanaly wrote: post #2

If they're not using the book text to train models (keeping the focus on this particular new Kindle feature), where's the room for objection? My device, my content, it's none of the author's business how I read it, in my view. Edit: Given I've been a reader of HN for some time, I am perfectly aware that on Kindle you don't own the content, just a license to the content. Don't need any more people pointing this out! L…

In the case of a novel, or even certain text books, the author relies on the reader not jumping ahead. Especially murder mysteries and those kind of genres. There are artistic reasons for that, and it can wreck the work. In my experience, AI summaries often miss points or misrepresent work. There is a human element to reading a well written novel. An AI will miss some of the subtleties and references.

But if I want to jump ahead and read the last page of a book first, is it reasonable for an author to tell me I can't do that?

Re: New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books

#68

Post by terafo »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #49
catgary wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying that an LLM needs to be trained on a specific piece of text to answer questions about it?

If you want proper answers, yes. If you want to rely on whatever reddit or tiktok says about the book, then I guess at that point you're fine with hallucinations and others doing the thinking for you anyway. Hence the issues brought up in the article. I wouldn't trust an LLM for anything more than the most basic questions of it didn't actually have text to cite.

Having access to the text and being trained on the text are two different things.
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