7 ms·
I kind of love the idea of feeding the text of entire books to an AI. More often than I’d like to admit, I’ll be reading a novel and find myself not remembering
by criddell 3y ago
I kind of love the idea of feeding the text of entire books to an AI. More often than I’d like to admit, I’ll be reading a novel and find myself not remembering who some character is. I’d love to be able to highlight a name in my ereader and it would see that I’m 85 pages into Neuromancer and give me an answer based on that (ie no spoilers).
Or have a textbook that I can get some help and hints while working through problems and get stuck like you might get with a good study partner.
- ChildOfChaos 3y agoI'd love to feed it all the advice books on certain topics that I am struggling with and then chat with it like a group of advisors.
- shard 3y agoWhatsapp now has an AI chat feature which includes chatbots such as relationship coach, travel expert, career coach
- TrueGeek 3y agoI'm the opposite. In movies (and real life to an extent) I have trouble telling people apart. I'd love a closed caption like service that just put name tags over everyone.
- ryandrake 3y agoThat's one of the perpetually-SciFi use cases of Augmented Reality: You're walking around with AR glasses and whenever someone comes into your field of view, your display hovers over them their name, their job, when you last talked to them, what their hobbies are, and so on. A huge privacy nightmare, but useful for people who can't recall names and details about people they've met.
- visarga 3y agoBasically the Slack experience. You don't need to remember people, you can see your past interactions right there.
- egeozcan 3y agoI don't think it'd be a privacy nightmare if it used private databases created by the user. Like a personal CRM, something like Monica, but with a real-time touch.
- avarun 3y agoWouldn't be from a legal sense, but the societal implications of technology like that becoming commonplace are still immense. The limitations of human memory provide safety in a way today that would quickly erode if everybody could remember exactly everything that's ever been said or seen around them.
- Breza 3y agoI agree with you. I had a bit of a falling out with a friend and wanted to check in on her a few years later. The immediately preceding messages in Messenger were the largely-forgotten unpleasantness. Quite awkward. It really drove home how much of a blessing forgetting every little slight is.
- chambored 3y agoSafety from what exactly?
- avarun 3y ago"You said X 3 years ago, but now you said, which is the opposite of X. How dare you?" is one class of problems. Another is that you can learn quite a bit more about a person than they wished to actually divulge to you if you're able to capture and study their exact behaviors over a long enough stretch of time.
- BurningFrog 3y agoI've seen scenes in movies where assistants of heads of state will discreetly whisper to them who the people in the room are. With a service like this we could all live like Kings!
- avarun 3y agoThis features distinctively in the show Veep, where one of the main characters provides exactly this for the Vice President.
- eesmith 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farley_file https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farley_file > A Farley file is a set of records kept by politicians on people whom they have met. > The term is named for James Farley, Franklin Roosevelt's campaign manager. Farley, who went on to become Postmaster General and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, kept a file on everyone he or Roosevelt met. > Whenever people were scheduled to meet again with Roosevelt, Farley would review their files. That allowed Roosevelt to meet them again while knowing their spouse, their children's names and ages, and anything else that had come out of earlier meetings or any other intelligence that Farley had added to the file. The effect was powerful and intimate. > Farley files are now commonly kept by other politicians and businesspeople.
- Viliam1234 3y agoThe business version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_manageme...
- dboreham 3y agoThe sad truth is that technology isn't much used to help people. Instead it's used to make money. E.g. there's all this amazing AI, buy my phone keyboard autocorrect has the intelligence of a slug.
- crooked-v 3y ago
- gniv 3y agoAmazon already does some of this (they identify actors in a scene iirc), so they could "easily" extend it to what you're suggesting.
- esafak 3y agoXray, they call it. It's a great feature! https://www.amazon.com/salp/xray https://www.amazon.com/salp/xray
- hn_user82179 3y agoI adore X-Ray. It's great for finding songs I like that are played in a video, or figuring out some actor who looks familiar but I can't tell. And of course for remembering character names. I'm honestly so surprised no other streaming services offer a similar feature.
- mncharity 3y agoMany years ago there was an MIT startup based on the idea, IIRC, that subliminally flashed names increased recall among cognitively impaired elderly when the flashed names were correct, but didn't negatively impact recall when the flashed names were incorrect. So even quite poor face recognition could be worthwhile.
- golergka 3y agoWhen I first watched Departed, I didn't realise that Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio's characters are different people until the third act. It was very confusing.
- neltnerb 3y agoHah, I thought I was the only one. I'm not particularly face blind either... something about the era I guess.
- antifa 3y agoLoudest thing online is people complaining about minorities existing in TV shows. A much bigger, real problem, is when they regularly cast 3 characters with almost exactly the same skin tone, skin texture, hair color, hair length, hair style, eye color, clothing style, face shape, voice, body type. Then the character's name is given once (if given) and you see several scenes without the character. Several scenes with the clones. Sudden scene with 2 clones in the same scene. You really couldn't give these three white people a different hair style? Make one wear glasses?
- crazygringo 3y agoThat's a truly fantastic idea actually. I'd love to see that built into e-readers. As well as when I pick back up reading after two weeks -- remind me everything that's happened so far? Where it gives a five-paragraph summary where the first paragraph is top-level covering the entire story so far, and the last paragraph is just about the previous few pages. Not to mention with non-fiction -- highlight an acronym that was defined somewhere 28 pages ago and tell me what the heck it is again?!
- glhaynes 3y agoI love these ideas. One more: "He said xyz but we know he's lying. What would motivate him to do that?"
- mbil 3y agoKindle X-Ray kind of does this https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/what-is-x-ray-for-the-amazon-kindle https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/what-is-x-ray-for-the-am...
- ornornor 3y agoYeah but then you have to contribute making Bezos even richer.
- bamboozled 3y agoBezos getting richer? Get used to it.
- ornornor 3y agoI don’t have to contribute to it, as much as I can help it.
- pyinstallwoes 3y agoWhat do you use instead of Amazon?
- ornornor 3y agoAnything else. I live in Switzerland and prefer to use galaxus, Migros, inter discount, mueller, foletti, or buy second hand. Absolutely anything I can to not buy from Amazon even if the alternative is 10–15% more expensive.
- bamboozled 3y agoWhat do you hate so much about Amazon that makes the alternatives so much better ? Genuinely ?
- 3y ago
- world2vec 3y agoGreat idea, especially with huge books with hundreds of characters (looking at you "Gravity's Rainbow" and your ~400 characters with wacky names).
- wouldbecouldbe 3y agoFor most classic novels I expect GPT to already have in it's memory.
- cryptonector 3y agoSoon we'll have AI writing books, then reading them for us so we don't have to. There is value to that, if we mostly only use this capability to digest books we otherwise wouldn't read but also if we don't stop reading books. Most likely we'll just stop reading books, and that strikes me as scary.
- antifa 3y agoSome people have different preferences when reading books. This could be genre, prose style, word count, descriptions, verbosity, types of characters, themes. Perhaps there could be an outline, wiki, and full text, author's notes for the AI to use, then each reader can have a version presented that goes into extra details in accordance to known user preferences then cliffnotes mode for the parts less interesting to that person.
- keiferski 3y agoFYI someone did do this for Neuromancer. Not sure if they used AI or not. https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1ovTscY-bEuMNAEgNXTCXo2voDr7qRAf7QuDIZTYThXM/mobilebasic https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1ovTscY-bEuMNAEgNXTCX...
- jamie_ca 3y agoI can't recall which reader app I used, but I've seen this done before in ages past. No AI, so no big concept of inferred identities, but if someone's referenced by name you could long-tap the name, and get a list of all previous references in the text. Super useful for referencing secondary characters in super-long epics like The Wheel of Time.
- pests 3y agoI'm really bad with names. I almost wish for unique color highlighting for every name. I would remember previous scenes or conversations way better than keeping track of tons of character names.
- mschulkind 3y agoSome kindle books have the X-ray feature that does exactly this.
- Slow_Hand 3y agoIt would be amusing if the AI inferred the identity of a mystery character before they were revealed.
- skydhash 3y agoSome printed books has that. It’s called the dramatis personae. Everyone not listed in it is not important. So not even tech is needed for that.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago> I’d love to be able to highlight a name in my ereader I do this on my Kindle. Highlight the name, search, and the first occurrence is usually their introduction. No AI needed.
- Breza 3y agoEh, it is hit or miss. Same with definitions of words. I'm a native speaker of American English, so I know the most common definitions of words. When I'm touching a word for a definition, it's usually because it's being used in an unusual way. Consider this passage from Around the World in 80 Days... "He passed ten hours out of the twenty-four in Saville Row, either in sleeping or making his toilet." Huh? Does the character need to eat more fiber? Try selecting "toilet" in that sentence for a definition. You'll get the most common one, which only makes me more confused. AI should have an easy time knowing that the appropriate meaning is the OED's definition 5a: "Frequently in form toilette. The action or process of washing, dressing, or arranging the hair. Frequently in to make one's toilet."
- aidenn0 3y agoJapanese novels are particularly hard for me to keep characters straight due to sometimes very different forms of address depending on who (including the narrator) is mentioning the character.
- andromeduck 3y agoHad a similar experience reading Jane Austen, it never really made sense to me until I watched the movies