At present, there are multiple cases in which authors are suing AI companies for scraping their works without payment or permission. While these legal battles have been going on, Amazon has quietly added a new AI feature to its Kindle iOS app—a feature that “lets you ask questions about the book you’re reading and receive spoiler-free answers,” according to an Amazon announcement.
The company says the feature, which is called Ask this Book, serves as “your expert reading assistant, instantly answering questions about plot details, character relationships, and thematic elements without disrupting your reading flow.”
Publishing industry resource Publishers Lunch noticed Ask this Book earlier this week, and asked Amazon about it. Amazon spokesperson Ale Iraheta told PubLunch, “The feature uses technology, including AI, to provide instant, spoiler-free answers to customers’ questions about what they’re reading. Ask this Book provides short answers based on factual information about the book which are accessible only to readers who have purchased or borrowed the book and are non-shareable and non-copyable.”
As PubLunch summed up: “In other words, speaking plainly, it’s an in-book chatbot.”
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).”
Perhaps most alarmingly, the Amazon spokesperson said, “To ensure a consistent reading experience, the feature is always on, and there is no option for authors or publishers to opt titles out.”
It also sounds as though authors and publishers were, for the most part, not notified of this feature’s existence.
Amazon is already in the news this week for its flawed AI recaps of television shows. After a Fallout recap was “garbage filled with mistakes,” as io9 called it, the company paused the feature. A similar thing happened earlier this year with Amazon’s AI dubs for anime series.
As PubLunch says of Ask this Book, “Many rightsholders and creators are likely not to want an in-book chatbot without their specific review and approval (or at all), and we expect that message will be getting delivered to publishers and Amazon loud and clear in the ensuing days. And many people would deem the outputs of generative AI analyzing a particular copyrighted work as the very embodiment of a derivative work (or simply a direct infringement).”
Ask this Book is currently only available in the Kindle iOS app in the US, but Amazon says it “will come to Kindle devices and Android OS next year.”