In the last year, two philosophy professors have been calling eminent writers and public intellectuals with an unusual, perhaps heretical, proposition. They asked these thinkers if, for a handsome fee, they wouldn’t mind turning into AI chatbots.
John Kaag, one of the academics, 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,” which 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 suicide attempts. .
The two became friends 14 years ago when Mr. Kaag was struck by an essay Mr. Martin had written for Harper’s and called him. The two bonded over their disillusionment with academia and their belief that philosophy can be useful to more people if only they study it.
Over time, Mr. Kaag, 44, and Mr. Martin, 57, also bonded over their personal struggles. They have each been married three times and each has faced death. (In 2020, Mr. Kaag went into full cardiac arrest after a gym workout.)
How they ended up cold established authors is another story.
In April 2023, Mr. Kaag received an email from John Dubuque, a businessman who had become something of a patron.
Before joining his family’s plumbing supply business in St. Louis, Mr. Dubuque studied philosophy at the University of Southern California. Feeling intellectually stagnant, he began paying philosophy professors to take him through Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and other works.
Mr. Dubuque, 40, hired Mr. Kaag for a six-week seminar on William James’s “Varieties of Religious Experience.” The professor was the right person for the job, having published Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life in 2020.
At the time, Mr. Dubuque’s family business had recently been sold and he was looking for what to do next. During his conversations with Mr. Kaag, he suggested that they work together to create a publishing company.
As envisioned by Mr. Dubuque, the imprint would pair a world-renowned expert with a classic work and use technology similar to ChatGPT to replicate the dialogue between student and teacher. In theory, readers could ask, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin about presidential speeches or delve into Buddhist texts with Deepak Chopra.
Mr. Kaag jumped on board and brought his friend Mr. Martin into the project. The result is Rebind Publishing.
It will debut on June 17 as an interactive reading experience, available on mobile, desktop and tablet. Users will have free access during launch, with per-book pricing and a subscription model to follow later this year.
Mr. Kaag and Mr. Martin selected the authors to comment. They spent up to 20 hours interviewing each of these “Rebinders,” as they’re called, about their chosen texts, trying to cover every possible question a casual reader might have. The recorded interviews were then fed into AI software.
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Kaag and Mr. Martin sat down for an interview at the Boston Athenaeum, one of the nation’s oldest libraries. Mr. Martin wore jeans and a rumpled sweater over a T-shirt. His gray-brown hair was matted, giving him the appearance of an aging member of an indie rock band. Instead, Mr. Kaag wore a crisp dress shirt, tan chinos and brown dress shoes with turquoise socks.
Both seemed to be in disbelief at being given carte blanche to form a spiritual dream team.
“Man, this thing could be pretty cool,” Mr. Martin said, recalling his reaction when Mr. Kaag approached him with the idea. “Then we started brainstorming.” He said Mr. Kaag suggested, “Imagine if we could get Laura Kipnis in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’
Other authors participating in Rebind are Roxane Gay (“The Age of Innocence”), Marlon James (“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”), Bill McKibben (selections from John Muir), Margaret Atwood (“A Tale of Two Cities” ) and Bibologist and Princeton University professor Elaine Pagels (selections from the New Testament and the Secret Gospels).
For “The Dubliners,” classicist James Joyce, Mr. Kaag and Mr. 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,” Mr. Banville said by phone. “I was absolutely blown away by it. It wasn’t a Wild West story or an Agatha Christie story. It was the real thing, about life itself.”
There is a sense in literary circles that artificial intelligence is at odds with the arts and humanities. This is, after all, technology that some believe can push writers and teachers.
Writers who partnered with Rebind allowed their voices to be cloned and agreed to let their words be manipulated by AI
Asked if he had reservations about it, Mr Banville said: “My initial reaction was of course a deep suspicion. You read a book in hand and read it line by line, page by page. But this is a great way to get people to read classic books and not be afraid of them.”
“I got paid well for it,” he added, declining to disclose the amount. “But you know, it wasn’t the money. I was interested in this project. At my age, I’m taking part 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 a weird understanding block with artificial intelligence,” he said. “The minute someone says ‘AI,’ I’m done.”
However, he said: “What I thought was interesting was the revisiting of classic texts. And anything that will get people reading is generally great.”
Mr. Martin and Mr. Kaag are excited about the creative potential of artificial intelligence, regarding those who shun it as short-sighted. “It’s one of the great artistic opportunities of our time, to work with this tool,” said Mr. Martin. They hope to give the Rebind treatment to 100 classic works, all published before 1928 and therefore in the public domain.
Mr. Kaag and Mr. Martin took on canonical works themselves – Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” in Mr. Kaag’s case and Nietzsche’s “Thus Speke Zarathustra” for Mr. Martin.
Mr. Martin met the 19th-century German philosopher as a high school student in Calgary, Canada, after a tip from his English teacher. “It changed my life,” he said.
Growing up in central Pennsylvania, Mr. Kaag had a similar experience after his older brother left “Walden” over the toilet tank. He mentioned that he was reading the book to his Latin teacher, who later took him to Walden Pond, just outside of Concord, Massachusetts.
“I swam in the lake,” Mr. Kaag recalled. “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to be a philosophy professor, I’m going to teach ‘Walden,’ and I’m going to live in Concord.” Today I live 10 minutes away.”
Making that kind of experience with a book widely accessible is the driving idea behind Rebind, said Mr. Dubuque, who has put up his own money to fund the project, though he declined to say how much.
“I’m drawn to classics and older books because it’s a different kind of escape than watching Netflix,” she said. “There is this refreshing experience of escaping your time. These books also create a lot of meaning in your life.”
Mr Kaag likened the comments of AI-based writers to marginalia written in a book by an expert reader, before citing a more pop-cultural reference.
“We also thought of it as those Hogwarts papers that answer you,” he said.
