Member-only story
How I Read Books Better With AI
Generative AI is everywhere now — from automating work tasks to becoming your personal tutor. The options for using AI keep expanding, and more importantly, they’re becoming increasingly personalized. That’s when it hit me: if AI can do all that, why not use it as my own personal reading assistant?
Chat With the Author
This may sound strange, but you can use ChatGPT to talk to your favorite authors. Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Kafka. This is not magic, it’s the power statistics and patterns. Large language models (LLMs) have been trained in almost all public content available online, meaning when you ask about Jane Austen, it has probably read all of her works and what other people wrote on her.
However, you should know one key limitation of generative AI: while it has read almost everything, it retains only a hazy, generalized memory of texts — it generates answers from patterns, not exact recall. This is one reason you may sometimes see ChatGPT confidently produce incorrect facts, technically known as hallucinations.
To fix the problem of vague memory and reduce hallucinations when chatting about a book, you can send ChatGPT the chapter or excerpt of what you reading as a PDF, photo or even plain text. That revives the LLM knowledge on that subject, producing better results.
