Calibre adds AI "discussion" feature

Calibre adds AI "discussion" feature(lwn.net)

27 points by pykello 143 days ago | 32 comments

gmuslera 143 days ago |

I think it adds value. Having a conversation with/around a book/document with an AI is a good use case, and having that feature as a not forced option in a book management solution a good match.

It is not something that works regardless if we configure or activate it or not. It may broaden the AI use for people that find that useful? Yes. Would that end being dependency on a particular provider? Maybe on how we use it. At some point a lot of those decisions were taken in the past by most of the rest, like using search engines or a narrow/builtin set of browsers or desktop/mobile OSs. If using AIs is a concern then the ship has sailed long ago for many bigger things already.

Arodex 143 days ago | |

[flagged]

gmuslera 143 days ago | | |

I'm interacting with a language model, using language and normal phrases. That is basically a conversation from my point of view, as is mostly indistinguishable from saying the same and getting similar answers that I could get from a real person that had read that book. No matter what is in the other side, because we are talking about the exchanged text and not the participants or what possibly they could had in their minds or chips.

VertanaNinjai 143 days ago | | |

If you’re against anthropomorphism of LLMs then how can it “encourage” you if you’re not having a conversation? How could it “convince” you of anything or cast something in a bad light without conversing?

Your point about censorship, however, I fully agree with.

e-khadem 142 days ago | | |

Safety is a valid concern in general. But avoidance not the right way to approach it. Democratizing the access to such tools (and developing a somewhat open ecosystem around it) for researchers and the general public is the better way IMO. This way people with more knowledge (not necessarily technical. For example philosophers) can experiment and explore this space more and guide the development going forward.

Also, the base assumption of every prospering society is a population that cares about and values their freedom and rights. If the society drifts towards becoming averse to learning about these virtues ... well, there will be consequences (and yes, we are going this way. For example look at the current state of politics, wealth distribution, and labor rights in the US. People would have been a lot more resentful to this in the 1960s or 70s.)

The same is true about AI systems. If the general public (or at least a good percentage of the researchers) study it well enough, they will force this alignment with true human values. Contrary to this, censorship or less equitable / harder access and later evaluation is really detrimental to this process (more sophisticated and hazardous models will be developed without any feedback from the intellectuals / the society. Then those misaligned models can cause a lot of harm in the hands of a rogue actor).

emodendroket 141 days ago | | |

> Will it report me if I try to discuss "The anarchist's cookbook" with it?

I don’t know. Weren’t you already running that risk with “download metadata”?

squigz 143 days ago |

> After much pushback, it looks as though users will get the ability to hide the feature from calibre's user interface, but LLM-driven features are here to stay and more will likely be added over time.

With the whole "no local models?! mega corp censorship!" complaint sidestepped from day 1, and now that it's not even shown on the UI, what will AI opponents complain about?!

gardenerik 143 days ago |

I struggle to understand the pushback against AI features. As long as the feature isn't intrusive, it seems like a minor addition, and may even be useful to some people. LLMs are here to stay, there is no denying that at this point.

resfirestar 143 days ago |

The addition doesn't really bother me because Calibre is already full of features that seem utterly useless, so I trust its author to add new stuff without ruining the parts that are useful to me. Still, does anyone actually use "ChatGPT bolted onto the ebook reader" type features for anything besides cheating on school assignments? Lack of web search tools makes them suboptimal for asking clarifying questions or getting recommendations. Makes some sense on a Kindle where you can't exactly alt-tab to ask ChatGPT directly, not so much in a desktop application.

Not to say that there's no use case (I'd be interested to try a LLM-aided notetaking tool), just that adding a chat box is hardly a feature.

another_twist 143 days ago | |

Its useful for answering questions related related to back references. eg who was this character if you're reading a novel with too many of these.

resfirestar 143 days ago | | |

Oh true, that actually sounds useful. I often just avoid that kind of novel because I'm terrible with names.