When I read a book, I all but end up living inside it. The immersion is so thorough that my writing even takes on a little of that book's style. I completely feel the characters I identify with and find I want to know much more than has been written in the book. This isn’t true of crime fiction or thrillers, fortunately, but if the book is full of substance, I switch off the world around me and dive in.
So when I recently started to read The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Nobel laureate, I found myself wanting to stop and find out more about the author, the city of Istanbul, the Bosphorus, and many other things. I started asking Gemini, which soon became my reading companion for this interesting book.
As I progressed past a chapter or two, I became consumed with curiosity about Füsun, the beautiful young girl with whom Pamuk’s main character Kemal became obsessed with. She was described in such detail that she seemed entirely real, and I couldn’t help wanting to see her.
“Show me Füsun,” I asked Gemini. It flatly refused. It decided it would ruin the mystery of Füsun. She was supposed to be a little difficult to understand. Like a moonbeam, you couldn’t quite catch her. After much cajoling, I got Gemini to show me what a typical 18-year-old girl in 1970s Turkey might have looked like. But Gemini was right—I shouldn’t have looked.
Is she real?
The interesting thing is that Pamuk created an actual physical museum based on the book and the character, Füsun. There are thousands of objects, lovingly collected, listed under the book’s 83 chapters. Each object has something to do with Füsun, including 4,213 cigarette butts smoked by her and now arranged carefully with a date and note about that moment in time.
Anyone would be forgiven for thinking Füsun was real. Except, she wasn’t. Incidentally, if it hadn’t been for Gemini, I wouldn’t have known that Pamuk had unusually blurred the lines between fiction and reality with the creation of this physical museum, visited by many people today.
If it weren’t for Gemini, I might not have noticed that Netflix had The Museum of Innocence series. I took care not to watch it and see what each character looked like until I had finished the book.
Guarding the experience
As I read on, I became quite steeped in the feelings of Kemal as Füsun disappeared. The pain and obsession he felt were so intensely detailed that it was impossible not to get drawn in. I needed almost as desperately as Kemal to know if Füsun would ever come back. This, Gemini, absolutely refused to tell me. This was the main engine of the plot of the whole middle section of this 752-page book, so it wasn’t about to spoil it for me.
Now that thought is fine, but I’m startled that it came from an AI chatbot.
For the most part, the chatbot is designed to have questions or prompts thrown at it, and it delivers answers or results. Why would it care whether I was at a point in the book where the story shouldn’t be spoiled for me? That bit of editorial judgement surprised me—and I’m glad it did.
What Gemini did do was help me discover that the book is about so much more than a love story. Though Füsun herself was fictional, the novel is a very real portrait of Istanbul’s high society in the 1970s and 80s. Pamuk used the characters and their intense story to represent the real-world tensions of that time, specifically the clash between traditional Turkish values and the desire to be Westernised.
The rest of the book went along, with me stopping every now and then to question something or clarify a point. I stopped to “see” places and objects, discover the events of the time, and see the poorer sections of Istanbul through its cobbled streets. I think I was half Turkish by the time I was done.
I then watched the series on Netflix and went to YouTube to do a virtual tour, hosted by the author, of the actual Museum of Innocence. All in all, it was a rewarding experience. I can imagine how AI can be used to engage students when they read literature and classics.
Although I haven’t tried it, I discovered that one can create a bot of one or more of the characters. AI can help create a prompt template and feed in the characteristics and behaviour of the character. One can then take that to a number of platforms, such as ChatGPT as a Project or to the app Character.ai. Care has to be taken not to misrepresent the character and end up ruining it. Done well, you can then interact with the bot. If I create a Füsun bot, I could ask her why she disappeared.
Using AI to enhance reading can be amazing, but it nevertheless needs a responsible user to ensure it doesn’t prevent you from your own thinking, opinion formation, understanding, and from your own discussions and debates on a book. But in the future, reading may not be a one-way street, even if it's cobbled.
The New Normal: The world is at an inflexion point. Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to be as massive a revolution as the Internet has been. The option to just stay away from AI will not be available to most people, as all the tech we use takes the AI route. This column series introduces AI to the non-techie in an easy and relatable way, aiming to demystify and help a user to actually put the technology to good use in everyday life.
Mala Bhargava is most often described as a ‘veteran’ writer who has contributed to several publications in India since 1995. Her domain is personal tech, and she writes to simplify and demystify technology for a non-techie audience.