You know the feeling: you’re reading and something seems important but you don’t get it; or there’s a scene with a character but you’ve forgotten who they are.
In the past, you might turn to summaries of the book or to literary analysis for help. You might, for instance, ask, “what does the green light in The Great Gatsby mean?” And literary analysis might answer, “ the green light symbolizes Jay Gatsby’s unattainable dreams, particularly his longing for Daisy Buchanan, and represents the broader themes of hope, ambition, and the elusive nature of the American Dream.”
Now things can be more seamless. Amazon is introducing a feature into Kindle called “Ask This Book.” This is not a summary or a redirect to the part of the book that relates to your query. It’s an AI-generated interpretation. Authors cannot opt out of this feature, which currently only runs in the US but will be rolled out more widely this year.
Is that an important change? It would be an issue for the reader if it were prone to generating spoilers or hallucinating false answers. Because, of course, you’re not asking the book, the book the author wrote; you’re asking Amazon’s AI. So far, tests by Kindlepreneur (What Amazon’s ‘Ask This Book’ Feature Means for Authors | Kindlepreneur) have not found such faults. For authors, the feature affords a more complex challenge. Amazon is arguably producing a new edition of the book (comparable to an annotated edition) without the author’s consent.
Yet even for readers, there might be concerns. A reading is the text produced by the interplay of the author and the reader. Readers bring their own interpretations and visualisations to what the author offers. If that interpretation is outsourced to Amazon’s AI, both the author and the reader may be the poorer.
Lest this seem an author’s carping, let me say that the understanding of the green light above comes from Microsoft’s Copilot AI and is in line with the common critical understanding of Gatsby. I have had to use the Copilot AI because Amazon’s Ask the Book feature is not yet launched in the UK. But consider Copilot’s response to the question “what does the mistletoe in William Golding’s The Spire mean?”: the AI’s answer is “The mistletoe in The Spire functions as a deeply symbolic element tied to pagan myth, death, and the corruption underlying Jocelin’s ‘holy’ project. Its meaning becomes clearest when read through the Norse myth of Balder, which Golding deliberately echoes.”
In fact, literary analysis is much less unanimous about Golding’s mistletoe than about Fitzgerald’s green light. Though mistletoe is, indeed, a clear pagan symbol, its function in the Spire may (or may not) be to signal that Pangall has been sacrificed by the Cathedral builders to ward off bad luck. Golding never tells us this explicitly. Pangall simply disappears. Copilot gives a nod to this in secondary commentary: “Pangall’s persecution and eventual death are symbolically linked to the mistletoe.” But this commentary omits the possible connection between Pangall’s disappearance and his death at the hands of the builders constructing the spire. Jocelin, Dean of the Cathedral, in his vanity and madness, insists the spire must be constructed, even though the builders warn him the foundations will not support it. The builders have good reason to fear bad luck.
If the AI fails to signal this reading, it narrows the possible comprehension of Golding’s work. I look forward to being able to test this in Amazon’s AI.
If you are in the US and use Amazon’s Kindle iOS app, I’d love it if you’d ask it about the meaning of the mistletoe in The Spire and let me know the answer.
Neil MacDonald Author 