I came across a figure this morning that startled me. It said that “approximately 70%” of fiction today is consumed digitally. A small part of that figure came from audiobooks and was left out of the rest of the article. They said there’s an experiment going on that astonished me. Here’s how it goes – if the characters in the novel are experiencing a sunset, you could click on the word sunset, which would be highlighted. You would be presented with a short video clip of a spectacular sunset. Suppose you are reading a fantasy novel and it talked about a castle and a Dragon. In that case, you could click on that, and you would be presented with a video of a dragon flying around the castle. This new technique would only be applied in specific areas within the novel. I can see why because a couple in love could easily slip into pornography. The article said they were using AI, artificial intelligence, to automate the short video clips into the novel.
I’m not sure this idea is a good one. As we read, we all imagine that beautiful sunset in various ways. The sunset over an ocean is very different than a sunset over mountains. AI can be very powerful. I could see a library of short clips ranging from physical descriptions of items such as the appearance of heroes and heroines. It would be much like the cover art you see on paperback novels today. The cover art of today is a suggestion of what a character may look like that closely follows the description in the novel. As a writer, I do not go into great detail about a character. For example, I wouldn’t write this about a female character unless it was a good reason – that she had a small mole on the left side of her neck a couple of inches below her jawline. I want the reader to fill in their view of the characters or the castle or the Dragon.
I’d like to see how this idea is implemented, but I feel it would be a distraction from the novel. What do you think?
