Why AIs can't read?

The other day I wanted to think about love, confronting some authors (Clarissa Pinkola Estes - short story The Skeleton Woman, Alain de Botton, Eckhart Tolle, Alan Watts, various books on oxytocin and dopamine. Passion and the "after" of Passion and other themes).

It is more practical to call the AI to chat.

Parentheses: chatting with people makes days seem like good days. But people are often busy trying to pay mortgages that, not by coincidence, last their entire active working life, so in practice they never have free time to think about love - or about anything else other than company goals to pay off mortgages, a new type of never-ending hunt. This paragraph deserves a longer text, it's not that simple. I close the parentheses.

I was surprised to be informed by the AI that it did not have access to the books I cited.

My jaw dropped.

One of the main advantages of chatting with "huge brains" is that these AIs have already read everything about all the authors I mention, and all the other authors in the world from all times.

That's fine that we want communion, oxytocin, being together, living in a group, being trustworthy and trusting: talking to people, in person, who have read from zero to ten books each, just, but among hugs, laughter and exchanges of feelings is what fills day after day, year and decade after decade, creating the so-called flourishing/eudaimonia that allows one to be and, therefore, even to die, in peace. It's one way of looking at it.

But since people are hitting targets to produce more colorful plastics, fundamental consultancies, foods and entertainment (90% water and hormones), I am talking to AIs and it would be very, very cool at least for the AI to have access to all books written at any time. Besides web texts, videos, everything.

But no. The much-talked-about Opus 5.5 asked me for excerpts from the books which, since I didn't provide - how could I have every excerpt of every book on hand? - it ended up trying to compensate by searching public content on the internet.

I don't worry about whether, clandestinely or not, every AI was trained, yes, with all books and content of all times. The problem is that now, with me, it doesn't want to / can't use these contents. Only free content.

This has been going on for two days. It was going to be an interesting text, I was even going to publish it on my blog. Gemini's AI never asked for any book, but according to the other Opus AI, Gemini hallucinated and invented passages as if it also didn't have access to the books, except that instead of saying it didn't have access, it invented "approximately" correct contents. Since it was an important conversation, being "approximately" right, putting things in Alan Watts' or Alain de Botton's mouth that weren't actually in their quotes would take the discussion to fantastical places beyond measure.

Then I thought: it's the war of books. Whoever writes wants money. Fair?

It matters less whether it is fair to remunerate people for their effort like, for example, paying for books.

We don't need to judge. No verdict.

Suffice it to know that, in today's world, we are pushed to have to read books manually, and AIs cannot "read with us" - and chat, debate, refine and incorporate concepts.

Just like there is "open source" software, free of charge, a lot of content is free.

We will end up having to discuss things like Love, Economics, anything, via free content.

Paid books, unfortunately, are losing space in the deeper discussions that only large AI brains can develop.

Because they cannot be consulted on the fly during a conversation about a certain subject.

There is a chance paid books will lose market share if, now, content can be characterized as being able or not being able to be discussed with the help of AIs.

Not being able to be discussed with AIs would be like "not being on Google" was a few years ago. It might lose its charm to read something and not be able to discuss it with AIs.

Would it be a new market, the market of books that can, indeed, be discussed with AIs?

It would be enough for a publisher to propose the following: I let you - AI - discuss any excerpt from this book, just forbid quoting many pages in a row or any way of allowing the human to read the book without buying, via AI. With a contract of this type, publishers get the best of both worlds: AIs authorized to be reading partners, but still forcing the human to buy the book, in case they want to read everything, not being able to read the book by asking the AI page by page.

There you go, great solution. The world changes.

Or another solution. Or am I the only one seeing this problem?