I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again

WHEN A FLATTERING EMAIL ARRIVED inviting me to participate in an AI venture called Rebind that I'd later come to think will radically transform the entire way booklovers read books, I felt pretty sure it was a scam.

- LAURA KIPNIS

For one thing, the sender was Clancy Martin, a writer and philosophy professor I didn't know personally but vaguely recalled had written about his misspent youth as a smalltime jewelry-biz con artist, also being a serial liar in his love life. For another, they were offering to pay me. "Clancy up to his old ways!" I thought.

My role, the email explained, would involve recording original commentary on a "great book"-Clancy suggested Romeo and Juliet, though it could be any classic in the public domain. This commentary would somehow be implanted in the text and made interactive: Readers would be able to ask questions and AI-me would engage in an "ongoing conversation" with them about the book.

We'd be reading buddies. Proposing me for Romeo and Juliet did strike me as subversively funny-my "expertise" on romantic tragedy consists of having once written a somewhat controversial anti-marriage polemic titled Against Love. I've also written, a bit ironically, about the muddle of sexual consent codes, which I supposed could prove relevant. Juliet was, after all, only 13.

These days, Romeo (probably around 16-we're not precisely told) would risk being called a predator.

A bunch of decidedly illustrious participants, known as "Rebinders," had apparently already signed on: the Irish Booker Prize winner John Banville on James Joyce's Dubliners, best-selling writer Roxane Gay on Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, also Bill McKibben, Elaine Pagels, Garth Greenwell ...

And bringing up left field, Lena Dunham on E. M. Forster's A Room With a View, a quirky prospect.