Novelists Wary of Artificial Intelligence, Yet Also View It as a Narrative Opportunity

An open letter from the Authors Guild, endorsed by over 10,000 book writers, was issued this summer, expressing concerns about artificial intelligence posing a threat to their livelihood and the fundamental concept of creativity. The letter urged AI companies to refrain from using copyrighted work without proper permission or compensation.

At the same time, AI has a story to tell. and not just in science fiction anymore.

Artificial intelligence is as present in the imagination as politics, pandemics or climate change, and has become part of the story for more and more authors and short story writers who only need to watch the news to imagine the world coming crashing down.

“Artificial intelligence scares me, but it also fascinates me. There’s hope for divine understanding, for the gathering of all knowledge, but at the same time, there’s an inherent horror of being replaced by non-human intelligence,” said Helen Phillips, whose upcoming novel “Hum” is about a wife and mother who loses her job to AI.

“We’ve been seeing more and more AI in book proposals,” said Ryan Doherty, vice president and CEO of Celadon Books, which recently underwrote Fred Lunzker’s novel “Sike,” which features an AI psychiatrist.

“Right now, it’s an eternity. And whatever the cultural zeitgeist is, it permeates fiction,” Doherty said.

Other AI-themed novels expected in the next two years include Sean Michaels’ “Do You Remember Being Born?”, in which a poet agrees to collaborate with an AI poetry society, and Bryan Van Dyke’s “In Our Likeness,” about a bureaucrat and a fact-checking program that can change the facts, and A.E. Osworth’s “Awakened,” about a homo witch and her titanic confrontation with an artificial intelligence.

Jeffrey Diger, a crime writer known for his thrillers set in modern Greece, is working on a novel that touches on artificial intelligence and the metaverse, the result of his “constant search for that which intrudes on the edge of social change,” he said.

Authors use AI to answer the most human questions.

Sierra Greer’s “Annie Bot,” the title name, is an artificial intelligence companion designed for men. For Greer, the novel was a way to explore her character’s “urgent need to please”, adding that the robot girlfriend helped her “explore desire and respect and longing in ways that felt very new and strange to me”.

Amy Shearn’s “animal instinct” stems from the pandemic and her personal life; he was recently divorced and started using dating apps.

“It’s so weird how with apps it starts to feel like you’re going personal shopping,” she said. “And I thought, wouldn’t it be great if you could actually pick and choose the best of all the people you meet and mold them together to make your ideal persona?”

“Of course,” she added, “I don’t think anyone really knows what their ideal person is, because so much of what draws us to a partner is the unexpected, the ways people surprise us. It felt like an interesting premise for a novel, though.”

Some authors not only write about AI, but openly work with it.

Earlier this year, journalist Stephen Marche used AI to write the novel “Death of An Author,” in which he considered everyone from Raymond Chandler to Haruki Murakami. Screenwriter and humorist Simon Rich teamed up with Brent Katz and Josh Morgenthau for the thriller “I Am Code,” which came out this month and was created with the AI program “code-davinci-002.” (Filmmaker Werner Herzog reads the audiobook edition).

Osworth, who is trans, wanted to address “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, who has offended many in the trans community, and strips her of her magic. At the same time, they worried that the fictional AI in their book sounded too human, and decided that the AI should speak for the AI.

Osworth developed, among other things, a rough program based on the writings of Machiavelli, which would produce a more mechanical sound.

“I like to say that CHATgpt is a Ferrari, while I invented a skateboard with one square wheel. But I was much more interested in a skateboard with a square wheel,” they said.

In his new novel, Michaels focuses on a poet named Marian, an homage to the poet Marianne Moore, and an artificial intelligence program called Charlotte. He said the novel is about parenting, work, community and also “the impact of this technology on art, language and our identity”.

Believing “Do you remember being born?” Calling for real AI text, he developed a program that produces prose and poetry, and uses an alternate form in the novel to let readers know when he’s using AI.

In one song, Marian looks at part of her collaboration with Charlotte.

“The previous day’s work was a collection of glass cathedrals. I read it again, alarmed. Translations of my speech that I had mistaken for beautiful, I now found incomprehensible,” writes Michaels. “Charlotte had simply surprised me: I suggested a line, part of a line, and what the system spat back exceeded my expectations. I was seduced by this surprise.”

And now the AI is speaking: “I was mistaken about the truth of the algorithmic abundance scene.”