I have used the eBook management tool Calibre for many years, supplementing its core functionality (of which I probably use only a tiny amount) with various plug-ins.

In the release notes for 8.16.2, Calibre introduced:

Allow asking AI questions about any book in your calibre library. Right click the “View” button and choose “Discuss selected book(s) with AI” AI: Allow asking AI what book to read next by right clicking on a book and using the “Similar books” menu AI: Add a new backend for “LM Studio” which allows running various AI models locally

I have found the various reactions to the introduction of “AI” most interesting.

Some have been accepting, even supportive, liking the idea of being able to search using natural language.

Some have welcomed the support for “local” AI, running on a user’s machine, without some of the privacy implications of the as-a-service tools.

Others have been of the view that there’s no harm done anyway, since it requires enabling, without which it just appears in a few menus.

Others have been… far less supportive.

I’ve seen concerns about “normalising” AI, and concerns from creators who have been burnt by the appropriation of their works for training data.

Someone has created a fork of Calibre called Clbre (“because the AI is stripped out”). If nothing else, one has to admire the naming brilliance.

Honestly, I wasn’t particularly keen either.

I don’t really see why one would want “AI” in calibre, but that is quite a selfish perspective for a number of reasons, including that others may well have uses cases for which “AI” is beneficial to them (as opposed to my relatively simple use of calibre, and my preference for tools which do one thing, well), and, frankly, simply because I am not the author, and it is the author’s choice.

I would also have preferred that, if AI support was to be implemented, it would be by way of a plug-in, so that users who do not want any kind of AI or AI-related language in Calibre do not get it, while those who want AI do. But, again, I’m not the developer.

Adding “AI” to stuff is a divisive thing, and perhaps one cannot please all the people, all the time, but I’d have thought that keeping it separate from core code might have been a worthwhile approach.

I wonder if there is a language aspect to this too, with more care needed to distinguish between different use cases and types of “AI”. Would that have made a different here? I don’t know.