I have been creating a profile of my reading tastes, including tropes I do and do not like and subject matters I want to avoid. When I enter them into ChatGPT and ask for recommendations, here is what I found.
TLDR: It is better than all the automated suggestion engines such as goodreads and amazon but does require some extra work on my side. The results, though good, have their limitations. I will continue to use it.
The good:
ChatGPT has helped me avoid the trap I fall into occasionally of picking up popular books that everyone else loves, but I am just not into them. It will tell me that this book does contain a themes you tend to avoid such as ___, and tell me what it is, which is great.
ChatGPT has also sold me on a books I wouldn’t pick up, not because I didn’t like it, but other things got in the way. Like it kept recommending Project Hail Mary, but because I already read (and loved) The Martian, I felt like I already experienced it. But finally gave it a shot and found myself loving Project Hail Mary too. ChatGPT also recommended The Picture of Dorian Gray, a classic. I don’t consider myself a classics reader, but gave it a shot and also loved it.
The bad:
Memory limitations – At least with the free version of ChatGPT, it will not remember everything forever and ever. There will come a time when its memory is full and conversations need to be deleted. This is bad because I want to remember that I don’t like a certain type of book or that I love this trope. Googling around this seems to be an issue with a few of the AI bots, so I haven’t found a solve for this yet.
It only knows what people say about it – this is an issue for trigger warnings. If you hate something like animal death and it’s not something that book reviewers or goodreads talk about that book, ChatGPT may not know that happens in a book. It may be an insignificant plot detail to 99% of the reading audience, but to you, it’s a big deal! Also topics that can be spoilers such “does the protagonist die” maybe won’t be mentioned because people tend to avoid spoilers. ChatGPT knows a lot of details about the classics, but newly published books have the least amount of info written about them.
It has a hard time finding hidden gems – If you ask it a wide open query just recommend me some books, it tends to give you popular bestsellers. I had better results asking it to give me recommendations based on a specific list. Similar to the last issue, if it’s a book that not a lot of people talk about, it doesn’t know a lot about it and may not recommend it.
It doesn’t understand what I mean – When I ask it to give me books that have characters challenging society at large, it gave me books about protesting and activism, which isn’t what I meant exactly. What I meant were books where the main character is the first female in an all-male organization. Or being a divorcee in a society that shuns divorce. So, finding the words to describe and get to the heart of what I want, has been a challenge.
If anyone uses AI for book recommendations, let me know your experience. Any tips and tricks are appreciated.
by mariberries
3 Comments
We used chatgpt to put our 12 bookclub selections in order this year. It made good arguments for why certain books would go with certain times of the year. I was very pleased.
I might use it to do recommendations for next year’s bookclub!
I used ChatGPT to recommend Climate Fiction books and got good recommendations of books I had not heard of.
I gave it a try for this, too. Like you, I found it did a much better job than automated suggestion engines. I even liked that you need to share more detail with it sometimes and work to describe things more clearly because it’s a lot like talking to a person – like if you asked me for books where characters challenge societies at large, I’d also start with stuff that has activism and protests and so on (including dystopias) until you explained further. I love how you can drill down into the finest details of what you want with ChatGPT.
I know LLMs aren’t popular in this sub, but there’s no doubt that they’re useful for certain things, and this is one of them. I also like them for creating writing **outlines**. I show ChatGPT or Claude (usually Claude) all the facts and insights I want to include in an article, and then it arranges them very nicely into a sensible structure that I can draw from while I write.