Amazon’s new Kindle ‘Recaps’ feature is … suspicious
Amazon is implementing a new “Recaps” feature for Kindle readers. That should be great news, right? Not exactly. Well, not if you’re against Generative AI being shoved into any application that requires an internet connection, at least. (I still can’t believe I have to see Meta’s irritating little AI circle logo every time I open WhatsApp).
I’m all for recaps when it comes to long book series. TV shows have been providing them for decades, so why shouldn’t we have them for books? It can take well over a year, sometimes years, for a sequel to be released, and long-form narratives are delicate and complex. It’s easy to forget an important detail from a 500-page book. I’m a fan of this new Kindle development in theory, but I’m not a fan of how Amazon is implementing it. Not at all.
Amazon has confirmed this new feature will utilize GenAI. The tech giant seemingly attempted to hide this information at first, however, as it wasn’t included in the company’s official press release. Instead, they later revealed the truth to TechCrunch after the news outlet approached Amazon for clarification. “We use technology, including GenAI and Amazon moderators, to create short recaps of books that accurately reflect book content,” an Amazon spokesperson explained.
The issue is that if Amazon is using GenAI for this new recap feature, that means that presumably, at some point, the books being recapped had to have been scraped and fed into their AI program. Did the authors knowingly consent to this, however? What’s to stop Amazon from using all this data to produce and publish its own AI-generated books one day, negating the need to pay authors for their hard work at all?
Yes, this feature is convenient, and proponents of GenAI love to use that word. My question, however, is this: why not simply ask publishers and/or authors to provide their own recaps? Amazon is a massive source of revenue for them, so I’m sure they’d be willing to accommodate such a request, and really, no one is better suited to do so.
Certainly not LLMs, I’d wager, which have, on many occasions, been known to hallucinate answers. The accuracy of these AI-generated Recaps is another major issue. Will Amazon’s moderators have read all the books themselves, and as such, be able to judge how well-informed the recaps are? If so, why not simply ask them to provide a recap instead? Is GenAI genuinely better for this particular task, or is this feature merely providing Amazon with another avenue to test its latest software and another step towards eliminating the human element from publishing altogether?
(featured image: Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images)
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
