I'm not sure why it took me so long, but I recently tried asking ChatGPT to distill ideas from a book I was reading. At first, the prompts were along the lines of "give me chapter summaries", but the responses caused me to get into a really useful dialogue about particular points I didn't understand.

Then, I began to ask about related ideas, like what a certain author might think of a certain topic. This produced even more insightful answers.

I'm sure I'm a few years late to the idea of AI-assisted reading, but the conversation I just had answered so many questions I had that would have otherwise fallen into the category of "i guess we'll never know what the author meant when they said X".

Highly recommend asking ChatGPT about the questions that pop into your mind when reading a book.

I don't see this as a good substitute for reading books, but it's super helpful for connecting the dots.