When I read a book I usually have a pen or highlighter in one hand so I can mark passages I find interesting. When I’ve finished reading the book I go back through, transcribing these favorite bits and save them to a PDF. This makes it possible to search for and find just about anything if I can recall a word or phrase. (I also create a blog post that includes these excerpts.) You can see an index here and here.

I uploaded one of these excerpt pages to ChatGPT and asked what she could do if she had my full archive (144 books as of this writing). Her response was detailed and impressive.

I’ve always had the ability to search these files (and blog posts) by word or phrase and I’ve found that very useful. But adding AI to the mix takes it to an entirely new level.

I don’t know of another soul who annotates and archives their reading in this fashion so this is probably a head-scratching-why-bother project for most folks. But it’s one more example of what AI is capable of.