When flattering I received an email inviting me to participate in an AI venture called Rebind, which I later thought would radically change the way book lovers read books. I was sure it was a scam. First, the sender was Clancy Martin, a writer and philosophy professor whom I didn’t know personally, but I vaguely remember writing about his wasted youth as a small-time fraudster in the jewelry business and also being a serial liar in his love life. Secondly, they offered to pay me. “Clancy’s back to his old ways!” I thought.
My role, as explained in the email, would be to record an original commentary for “a great book,” Clancy suggested Romeo and Juliet, although it could be any classic in the public domain. This commentary would somehow be grafted onto the text and become interactive: readers could ask questions, and the artificial intelligence would engage in an “ongoing conversation” with them about the book. We would read, friends. Proposing to me Romeo and Juliet I found it perversely funny – my “knowledge” about romantic tragedy is that I once wrote a somewhat controversial anti-marriage polemic entitled Against Love. I also wrote, somewhat ironically, about the confusion sexual consent codes, which I suppose could prove important. Julia was only 13 years old. Nowadays, Romeo (probably around 16 – we weren’t told exactly) would risk being called a predator.
A group of decidedly illustrious participants, known as ‘Rebinders’, have apparently already signed up: Irish Booker Prize winner John Banville on James Joyce’s novel Dubliners, best-selling author Roxane Gay at Edith Wharton’s The age of innocencealso Bill McKibben, Elaine Pagels, Garth Greenwell… And parenting left field, Lena Dunham on EM Forster’s A room with a view weird perspective.
Clancy went on to explain that someone named John Dubuque, who sold the company for “tens of millions of dollars,” came up with the idea for the venture after several months of working on an extremely difficult book by philosopher Martin Heidegger. Being and time with a tutor. Clancy said he hopes this type of (no doubt expensive) individual reading will be available to everyone. I googled John Dubuque. Nothing worked out. How to sell a company for several million and not leave a trace? My deception antenna was vibrating again. I figured I’d be asked to invest in the company next, probably in the form of Apple gift cards.
I agreed to a telephone interview with Clancy, and shortly after being greeted, I asked for further details about Dubuque, which I was not sure existed. “Sounds a bit like Gatsby,” I said, politely covering my skepticism with a literary allusion. Clancy claimed to have met him – a “great guy” from the Midwest, a really nice guy – and then got down to business. If I signed up, Rebind would first record a few short videos of me talking about art and any aspects of it that interested me – these would be embedded in various places in the text. And then me and the interviewee (probably Clancy), called “Ghostbinder” in the company, recorded 12 (or more!) hours of conversations – this was the basis of AI-Laura’s comments. The conversation may be about Romeo and Juliet but also related topics: Is love at first sight trustworthy? Is 13 too young to get married? The content was entirely up to me: my job was not to be a Shakespeare expert, just to be interesting. As Rebind users read the play, chat windows opened where they wrote down their responses in journal form, to which AI-Laura responded, drawing from and remixing the recordings I had made.
Even if it was technically possible and Dubuque was legal, did I really want to be involved? I have all the usual fears about artificial intelligence – that it will usher in the end of human history; that underneath the mask is a charming sociopath who tries to get tech reporters to leave their wives; that even its inventors don’t understand how it works; that it is so ruthlessly intelligent that we will soon be working on it, believing that it works for us.