World's Fair 2025
Books reimagined: AI to create new experiences for things you know — Lukasz Gandecki, TheBrain.pro
Overview
This talk explores reimagining books through AI to create novel user experiences. The core idea is to augment familiar content with dynamic, AI-generated elements like contextual summaries, character visualizations, and scene-appropriate music, transforming passive reading into an interactive, immersive journey. The approach emphasizes integrating AI subtly to enhance, rather than replace, the human element in content creation.
Who should watch
- AI Engineers interested in novel applications beyond chatbots.
- Product Managers seeking to innovate with existing content formats.
- Builders looking for ways to create immersive user experiences.
- Developers exploring the use of AI for content analysis and generation.
- Anyone curious about enhancing traditional media with AI.
Key takeaways
- AI can be used to generate contextual summaries and provide background information for characters within a book, aiding comprehension.
- Interactive voice notes allow users to ask questions about specific scenes, with the AI responding quickly and contextually.
- Semantic search, powered by embeddings, enables users to find scenes based on conceptual understanding rather than exact keyword matching.
- AI can perform deep research by reading through a book up to a specified point to answer complex queries about themes or plot elements.
- Developing with AI can accelerate iteration, as discarding AI-generated code is less burdensome than discarding human-written code.
- The speaker advocates for focusing on "low-hanging fruit" when refactoring AI-generated code, prioritizing changes that offer the most benefit with the least pain.
- The approach involves hiding the AI from the end-user, focusing on creating a seamless, magical experience rather than a direct AI interaction.
- Combining AI-generated elements like graphics, music, and metadata with human oversight can create rich, "Netflix-style" experiences for books.
Notable quotes
*Throwing away code written by by AI actually feels great.*
*We build AI experiences that ship and delight and not slides.*
Unofficial community note. Prefer the recording for nuance.