I believe that the quality of reading comprehension is tied to the number and quality of questions asked by the reader. I believe that’s a common notion and has been so for some time.

A week or so ago, Tyler Cowen wrote about using AI to read books. His big idea is: ask more questions to the AI about what you may not understand. You can read Tyler’s post here. I go a step further.

Many large language models, AIs, are trained on a broad set of knowledge — including many modern books. And, AIs are like very sophisticated “auto completes” — they’re good at predicting what they should respond with based on what’s been written. Therefore, they are likely good at adopting the persona of an author and figuring out how the author might respond. My intuition tells me — ask the AI to adopt the persona of the book’s author and engage!

Click here to read an output from Perplexity based on a question I asked.

Yes, ask lots of questions AND ask your AI-partner to adopt the persona of the author or an expert. The link above describes exactly what that looks like.