Mastodawn

Bought an anatomy book. Kindle immediately highlights "Ask this Book," before I read it. Annoying. It would be annoying even if Amazon paid authors extra for LLM training on their book and even did it privately on the reader's device, but they don't. That's a "derivative work" right they ain't paying for, btw. I want to remove the distracting button, too. For usability reasons. But I can't. Can't remove the Rufus from the store app that adds extra friction to buying and searching for things. Are they mad? Bonuses do trump good UI design, right?

I hope #Amazon gets burnt (to a cinder) when #AI spirals into the financial black hole it's forming. #askthisbook #rufus #author

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masukomi 1d ago

@sfwrtr to be clear, this functionality doesn't involve using the book as training data for their models.

I'm not saying they _don't_ train on people's books, BUT this particular feature doesn't require / involve having trained on the book. In theory you could have a book with this functionality that amazon has excluded from its model training.

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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist

@masukomi
Good point! Thanks for your response.

Searching the book has existed for awhile, on all Kindles and the app. Ask the Book is new and different. Google search even before AI was pretty good at figuring out what I wanted to find, deciphering my query… before they decided to bias toward showing results that were sponsored or could even slightly imply commerce. I still use the non-AI version as it is often provides the most relevant results.

My understanding is that Amazon trains an LLM with the books. I ended up at the Author's Guild to inform and correct my rant (and yes, what I wrote was a rant and I am embarrassed about that). As an author, I am comfortable with any bias they have on the subject. Quote first, then link.

The Guild is concerned that Ask this Book turns books into searchable, interactive products akin to enhanced ebooks or annotated editions—a new format for which rights should be specifically negotiated—and, given Amazon’s stronghold on ebook retail, it could usurp the burgeoning licensing market for interactive AI-enabled ebooks and audiobooks.

Amazon’s Response

We reached out to Amazon with our concerns and they reported to that “The feature only uses content from the book as a prompt which is not retained or used to train the underlying AI model.” An Amazon spokesperson explained that Amazon considers the feature to be “a natural language expansion of the search functionality that already exists in Kindle apps and for which no license is required.” Amazon further reasons that “readers have been asking these questions through internet searches for years and that this feature is more native, spoiler-free, and helps customers keep reading as opposed to coming out of the book, which is the case today with all other ways to answer questions about the book you’re reading.”

The Guild’s Take

We do not entirely agree with this depiction. In creating a chat feature that allows readers to ask questions about a book—including analysis and summaries—Amazon is possibly creating a derivate use, not a mere search function. Amazon has confirmed that it is using a “standalone” instance of an AI model to answer user queries and that its responses are based solely on the text of the book purchased by the user. This may suggest that Ask this Book uses RAG (retrieval augmented generation) technology, though we don’t have confirmation of this. RAG uses, for which there is a growing market, are typically licensed. The most common application of RAG technology is to make the output of LLMs more accurate in AI-based search engines.

—from https://authorsguild.org/news/statement-on-amazon-kindle-ask-this-book-ai-feature/#:~:text=The%20Guild%20is%20concerned%20that,not%20a%20mere%20search%20function.

#AI #Amazon #Askthisbook #writingCommunity #writersOfMastodon #authorsguild #author opinion.

Authors Guild Raises Concerns About Kindle’s New “Ask This Book” AI Feature - The Authors Guild

The Authors Guild has significant concerns with Amazon’s new “Ask this Book” feature, which has been available since December 11, 2025, on certain Kindle devices and the Kinde iOS app. It is the most recent in a suite of new […]

The Authors Guild

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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist 1d ago

@masukomi
I underlined in my previous post, about the Authors Guild's take on Ask This Book, the statement that,

Amazon has confirmed that it is using a “standalone” instance of an AI model to answer user queries and that its responses are based solely on the text of the book purchased by the user.

My understanding as a former programmer learning to use #AI as a tool is that an existing AI—used to parse natural language and to respond with synthetic cogency—needs be teamed together with a locally trained LLM to respond specifically. An example of this was to train auto accident reports to provide summaries without needing to read all the reports or training tech support tickets to provide procedures that can be used by tech support personnel to provide tech support. I was about to be tasked with the latter when I retired.

Ask This Book doesn't sound like any more than what I learned to do. But Amazon's feature definitively requires training an LLM. How could it not?

An AI, in its current formulation, is little more than a tool to pattern match data biased by frequency trends in that data. The book needs to be trained if "spoilers" are to be avoided. This is a self-indictment by Amazon.

#ai #amazon #askThisBook #author #writingCommunity #writersOfMastodon #llm #kindle #llms

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masukomi 1d ago

@sfwrtr no, your definition of "training" is wrong.

It does need to READ the book. But it's using a pre-trained model.

This is almost guaranteed to be Retrieval Augmented Generation.

The book’s content would be read, tokenized, and embeddings (vectors of word distances (kinda)) would be created. The LLM would then (oversimplified) use those embeddings to augment its results. However the underlying model receives zero training as a result of this process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrieval-augmented_generation

Retrieval-augmented generation - Wikipedia

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masukomi 1d ago

@sfwrtr the key point here is that RAG doesn’t feed the plagiarizing machine.

Realistically there’s no way Amazon isn’t ALSO training on people’s books BUT this particular thing isn’t that OR a problem authors should be stressing about.