Kindle AI Lets Readers Argue With Literary Characters About Their Toxic Traits

SEATTLE — Amazon unveiled its new “Kindle Empathy Engine” feature Tuesday, allowing readers to confront literary characters about their toxic behavior in real-time, sparking a generational war in the app’s review section and leaving English departments frantically adding “Therapeutic Reading Strategies” to their course catalogs.

The AI-powered feature enables users to pause their reading at any point to challenge characters on their problematic choices and emotional unavailability.

“I literally couldn’t get past page twelve of anything published before 2010,” said Maya Chen, 22, a comparative literature major at NYU who spent six hours arguing with Holden Caulfield about his avoidant attachment style before finishing Chapter 3 of The Catcher in the Rye. “He kept deflecting and calling everyone phony instead of doing the work.”

In beta testing, Gen Z readers declared Romeo and Juliet “codependent theater kids with zero emotional regulation,” with one user successfully convincing Juliet to ghost Romeo and focus on herself. The feature’s “red flag detector” has flagged 127 instances of concerning behavior in Wuthering Heights alone, leading three users to abandon the book entirely after diagnosing Heathcliff with narcissistic personality disorder.

UC Berkeley senior Jordan Kowalski, 20, explained that telling Elizabeth Bennet to “know her worth and stop entertaining Mr. Darcy’s neg energy” required forty minutes of back-and-forth dialogue. “The original ending feels like trauma-bonding now. I refuse to accept it as canon,” Kowalski said.

Older readers who mocked the feature have quietly begun using it themselves. Boomers are now flooding Tom Clancy novels with military corrections, telling Jack Ryan he’s “tactically incompetent,” and fact-checking John Grisham legal procedures with increasingly hostile exchanges.

“Someone has to tell these fictional attorneys how discovery actually works,” said Richard Hammond, 67, a retired patent lawyer who has left 34 argumentative comments in The Firm and describes himself as “just trying to help.”

Amazon reports current feature usage splits exactly 50/50 between Gen Z readers diagnosing literary mental health crises and Boomers mansplaining to fiction. Average reading time per book has increased 340 percent, with most users never finishing.

English professors report that students are now submitting essays exclusively analyzing characters’ “communication issues” and “inability to set boundaries,” with one Columbia professor receiving fifteen papers arguing that Moby-Dick is “really about Captain Ahab’s untreated whale-related PTSD and toxic obsession with revenge instead of healing.”

Penguin Classics announced Thursday it will include pre-written AI therapy sessions with all future editions to expedite the reading process, while Oxford University Press is adding mandatory trigger warnings to The Great Gatsby for “wealth disparity, unhealthy relationships, and cars.”

At press time, a reader had successfully convinced Anna Karenina to reschedule her train station visit and seek couples counseling instead, creating literature’s first AI-prevented fictional suicide.