For the past year, two philosophy professors have been visiting prominent authors and public intellectuals with an unusual, perhaps heretical, proposal. They’ve been asking these thinkers if, for a good fee, they wouldn’t mind becoming AI chatbots.
John Kaag, one of the scholars, is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is known for writing books, such as “Hiking With Nietzsche” and “American Philosophy: A Love Story,” that combine philosophy and memoir.
Clancy Martin, Mr. Kaag’s partner in the effort, is a professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City and the author of 10 books, including “How Not to Kill Yourself,” an unflinching memoir about his mental health struggles and 10 attempts suicidal. .
The two became friends 14 years ago, when Kaag was struck by an essay Martin had written for Harper’s and called him. The two bonded over their disenchantment with the isolated world of academia and their belief that philosophy could be useful to more people, if only they would study it.
Over time, Kaag, 44, and Martin, 57, also bonded over their personal struggles. Each of them has been married three times and has faced death. (In 2020, Kaag went into complete cardiac arrest after working out at the gym.)
How they ended up cold calling big-name writers is another story.
In April 2023, Kaag received an email from John Dubuque, a businessman who had become a patron of sorts.
Before joining his family’s plumbing supply business in St. Louis, Mr. Dubuque had studied philosophy at the University of Southern California. Feeling that he was stagnating intellectually, he began paying philosophy professors to teach him Martin Heidegger’s “Being and Time” and other works.
Dubuque, 40, hired Kaag for a six-week tutorial on William James’ “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” The professor was the right person for the job, as he published “Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save His Life” in 2020.
At the time, Mr. Dubuque’s family business had recently been sold and he was thinking about what to do next. During his conversations with Mr. Kaag, he suggested that they join together to create a publishing house.
Just as Dubuque envisioned, the imprint would combine a world-class expert with a classic work and use technology similar to ChatGPT to replicate the dialogue between a student and a teacher. In theory, readers could ask, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin about presidential speeches or delve into Buddhist texts with Deepak Chopra.
Mr. Kaag joined in and brought his friend Mr. Martin to the project. The result is Rebind Publishing.
It will debut on June 17 as an interactive reading experience, available on mobile, desktop and tablet devices. Users will have free access at launch, with per-book pricing and a subscription model to follow later this year.
Mr. Kaag and Mr. Martin selected the authors who would offer comments. They spent up to 20 hours interviewing each of these “Rebinders”, as they call them, about the chosen texts, trying to cover every possible question a non-specialist reader might have. The recorded interviews were then fed into artificial intelligence software.
On a recent afternoon, Kaag and Martin sat down for an interview at the Boston Athenaeum, one of the oldest libraries in the country. Mr. Martin was wearing jeans and a crumpled sweater over a T-shirt; His grayish-brown hair was disheveled, giving him the appearance of an elderly member of an indie rock band. In contrast, Kaag wore a crisp dress shirt, tan chinos, and brown dress shoes with turquoise socks.
Both seemed not to believe in their luck of having been given carte blanche to form an intellectual dream team.
“Man, this could be cool,” Martin said, recalling his reaction when Kaag approached him with the idea. “Then we started brainstorming.” He said Kaag suggested, “Imagine if we could get Laura Kipnis to act in ‘Romeo and Juliet.'” (They ended up hiring Kipnis, a cultural critic and essayist, to do just that.)
Other writers participating in Rebind include Roxane Gay (“The Age of Innocence”), Marlon James (“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”), Bill McKibben (selections from John Muir), Margaret Atwood (“A Tale of Two Cities ”) and Biblical scholar and Princeton University professor Elaine Pagels (selections from the New Testament and the Secret Gospels).
For “Dubliners,” the James Joyce classic, Kaag and Martin flew to Dublin to interview Irish novelist John Banville, who provided video and audio commentary.
“I first read ‘Dubliners’ when I was 12 or 13,” Banville said by phone. “I was absolutely captivated. It wasn’t a Wild West story or an Agatha Christie story. It was something real, about life itself.”
There is a feeling in literary circles that artificial intelligence is in opposition to art and the humanities. After all, it is a technology that some believe could displace writers and teachers.
Authors who have worked with Rebind allowed their voices to be cloned and agreed to have their words manipulated by AI.
Asked if he had reservations about it, Banville said: “My initial reaction was, of course, deep suspicion. You read a book in your hand and you read it line by line, page by page. But this is a wonderful way to get people to read classic books and not be afraid of them.”
“They paid me well for it,” he added, refusing to reveal the amount. “But you know, it wasn’t the money. He was interested in this project. At my age, I am participating in something new.” (Rebind commenters will also receive royalties.)
Ms Gay said she had little interest in the technology that made Rebind possible. “I have kind of a weird comprehension block with AI,” she said. “The moment someone says ‘AI,’ I’m done.”
However, he said: “What I did find interesting was reviewing classic texts. And anything that gets people reading is generally wonderful.”
Martin and Kaag are optimistic about the creative potential of AI and consider those who avoid it shortsighted. “It is one of the great artistic opportunities of our time to collaborate with this tool,” Mr. Martin said. They hope to give the Rebind treatment to 100 classics, all published before 1928 and therefore in the public domain.
Kaag and Martin took on canonical works themselves: Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” for Kaag, and Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” for Martin.
Martin met the 19th-century German philosopher as a high school student in Calgary, Canada, after his English teacher tipped him off. “It changed my life,” he said.
Growing up in central Pennsylvania, Kaag had a similar experience after his older brother left “Walden” on top of the toilet tank. He mentioned that he was reading the book to his Latin teacher, who then took him to Walden Pond, outside of Concord, Massachusetts.
“I swam in the lake,” Kaag recalled. “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to be a philosophy professor, teach ‘Walden,’ and live in Concord.’ Today I live 10 minutes away.”
Making that kind of book experience widely accessible is the idea behind Rebind, said Dubuque, who put up his own money to fund the project, though he declined to say how much.
“I’m drawn to classics and old books because they’re a different kind of escape than watching Netflix,” she said. “There is this refreshing experience of getting out of your time. These books also create a lot of meaning in your life.”
Kaag compared the AI-powered author’s comments to the margins scribbled on a book by an expert reader, before citing a more pop cultural reference.
“We also think of it as those Hogwarts newspapers that get back to you,” he said.
