I'm a bit busy at the moment - work is full on. I'm travelling. I've got an appointment for an ADHD assessment with the shrink tomorrow. It's all a bit much.
Throw book group into the mix and I think, yeah.
I've been in this book group for nearly 20 years, I've been running this one for about 15 of those 20 years. it's not biggy - just the odd restaurant booking, a Facebook post and it's good. Of these 15 years, only missed out on reading two books, One I didn't finish (Brendan Cowell's Plum - I found it unreadable), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half a Yellow Sun. (I was overseas). There's a bit of pride turning up every meeting having read the book, even if I've only finished it with minutes to spare.
Also, if it's your book up for discussion, you have to provide the questions.
In years gone by you'd trawl the internet trying to find question for the book. If the book was on the more obscure side, you'd often find nothing. If the book was more high-brow, the questions tended to be hard to understand - more university essay topics rather than discussion points.
Our book tonight was Dylin Hardcastle's A Language of Limbs. A wonderful, wonderful book. A book that was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. A book written by a trans author. A book that blurs boundaries.
And a book, when you look on google, has no reading group questions to speak of.
So, instead of thinking up some questions, which I'm normally able to do, but having a pickled brain, I fed a query into ChatGPT (which is still funny, because in French, "Chat, J'ai pete" means, Cat, I farted.
Anyway, my query was, "Provide a list of book group questions for the novel, A Language of Limbs."
A few seconds later, I was presented with two lists of ten questions. They were decent questions, but a little high brow. For a cold Tuesday night, I though AI could do better.
I asked them for a list of questions which were for a more casual group.
It delivered in spades. Decent, open questions on themes. Not too over the opt, but good for getting the discussion going.
It was great.
Do I feel like a fraud for using AI to do this? No.
Can I see the uses of AI? Yes.
Do I feel threatened by the existence of these computational systems which can do all of this? A little. But you still need people to drive them.
Regardless, it made light of a job that would have taken me 15 minutes and a gin and tonic.
And the group appeared happy. I'd be interested to see if anybody else in the group does this in the future.
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