My stack of novels today has one thing in common: AI. While artificial intelligence has been around in sci-fi books for quite some time, it has usually been in the form of artificial general intelligence: the sort of computer that is actually thinking, that has broad intelligence rather than specializing in one thing. It’s what the folks currently making LLMs and image-generating software want you to believe is right around the corner, and that it will be the result of their particular approach to machine learning. But that’s also what people thought about the previous forms of AI.
What I’m seeing now, though, is more fiction that portrays AI more like its current iteration: it’s mostly able to generate sentences, have conversations. It may or may not be actually intelligent. It’s pervasive and nearly omnipresent in society. But in many instances it also comes with its own pile of problems—and now that we are starting to understand how LLMs work (and how we as humans respond to it), writers are crafting stories where the AIs feel a bit closer to reality, even when other parts of the story are still outlandish (for now).
Love Is an Algorithm by Laura Brooke Robson
Here’s a love story: Eve and Danny, after knowing each other for ten years (and having had other serious relationships) finally go on a date with each other, and everything finally feels right. But that’s just how the book starts.
The plot jumps back and forth between the present and the past: Eve’s former relationship with an ultramarathon runner that feels … fine. Danny’s friendship with Eve’s older brother Julian and their little tech startup. Eve’s attempts to become a musician and her parents’ extreme disapproval. Danny’s mother walking out on him and his dad when he was twelve.
In the present, Julian and Danny are working on a dating app that pivots into an AI-driven relationship coach. It’s a hit—but even as Danny and Eve seem to have the perfect relationship, Danny increasingly relies on talking to his app for advice. What should he say to Eve? How should he bring up a particular topic? He even starts talking to his app about his other fears, like how to communicate with his dying father.
Mostly when I read books that involve dating, I’m just grateful that I don’t have to navigate that world today. It sounds soul-draining, figuring out how to put yourself out there. But even though Danny and Eve have some troubles with communication (come on, just talk to each other! you want to shout), their relationship really is very sweet, and they’re easy to root for. You want them to work it out, to figure out how much they actually do care for each other.
There are so many things that the book touches on: Eve’s experiences with social media, and the effects of AI on music creation, on celebrity and deepfakes; AI chatbots and the way that people can come to rely on them for more and more of their decisions; difficult relationships with parents and their expectations. And, of course, it’s about romantic relationships: how do you know if your relationship is working? If it’s not great, should you work to improve it or cut your losses? If there were an app that gave you a relationship score, what would that do to your brain?
I really liked the way this book handled AI: for the most part, it felt real and current, like something that could exist now or in the very near future. In particular, I think the way the characters use AI or talk about it was realistic, even the way that many of them used it while feeling slightly guilty for doing so.
Who Knows You by Heart by C. J. Farley
Octavia Crenshaw has just landed a job at Eustachian, a huge audio media company headquartered in New Jersey. Not a moment too soon, because she’s drowning in debt from her deceased mom’s reverse mortgage, so she really needs her stock options to vest quickly or she’ll lose her apartment. Being a Black woman in a big tech company isn’t easy, and Octavia feels lost in the weird culture, which often feels entirely cult-like. She gets recruited by Walcott, another Black coder, to work on a secret initiative. They’re working on an AI-driven storyteller, but one that is free of racist and sexist biases.
This story is a send-up of the tech world: Eustachian is a mix of dystopian office culture; nobody has assigned desks and there’s no hierarchy so Octavia doesn’t even know who to report to or what her assignment is for a while. Throughout the book are “technoaggressions”—things like everyone calling her Chloe, the name of a Black intern who isn’t even there anymore, simply because she was the only other Black woman they’d encountered at the company. There are NDAs on top of NDAs, and every day there’s another new training module to complete. It’s also a bit of a mystery: what is all this data that Eustachian is protecting behind layers of security? What’s on the top floor of the building, where the elevator won’t go?
While I did find the story itself compelling, the writing style took me a while to get used to. The story is told in the second person, present tense. “You arrive at work and are alone in the elevator.” “You’re watching a nature video about killer whales.” (Octavia is the “you” in question.) Second person is something that generally feels like it only makes sense for choose-your-own-adventure stories, or some sort of mind-blowing twist like Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life.” (And present tense can raise questions about who’s telling the story and why they’re telling me right now as it’s happening.) I suspected that there was going to be a reason for the second person—but it came a bit too late in the book and didn’t feel like the payoff was entirely worth the trouble.
The other thing is that most of the characters don’t get real names: Octavia gives people nicknames like “Wombat” and “Mr. Hollywood” and from then on those characters are referred to by those names, even when other characters talk about them. It feels like “Noelle Swizzler” is supposed to be Taylor Swift but without actually being Taylor Swift. There’s this weird sort of juxtaposition between the founder of Eustachian, who seems at least partially based on Elon Musk, but then there’s at least one reference to Musk himself. Mee Corp is the Amazon of this world, with ubiquitous automated delivery trucks … but then there is a reference to Amazon. It takes me out of the story a bit when that happens, because my brain struggles to figure out “but why does Amazon exist in this world?”
The AI in this book is certainly more advanced than what we have now; it’s either approaching general intelligence or has achieved it, though part of the issue is whether we’d be able to tell where that line actually is. The book is more focused, however, on the people behind it and the corporation that owns it. It’s about the deals we make when we feel like we have to, and the dangers of trusting a big tech company to do the right thing. There was a lot to like about the book, particularly the perspective of a Black writer talking about tech. I just wish I didn’t get stuck on the second-person framing of it.
Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffmann
This story, set in the far future, takes place mostly on Callisto, which has been settled by humans. The society has a very different relationship with AI, largely due to Inspiration, the AI company that now owns all the stories. Yes, all of them. Since it was a problem for the learning models to be based on copyrighted (or stolen) material, this company started buying up rights to stories, and now (at least on Callisto) they control the rights to everything. That also means that nobody is allowed to create their own stories without Inspiration’s permission, and Inspiration runs the entire media landscape.
Kelli Reynolds works for Inspiration, and she’s the creative genius behind a popular show about space pirate Orlando. She doesn’t actually write the show, though: she uses Inspiration’s software to edit AI output, always ensuring that the shows are deemed “appropriate.” But, as we all know from our own reality, one person’s views of “appropriate” can exclude or alienate others. Kelli herself is gay—while it’s not illegal to be gay on Calliso, it’s also not something that will ever be portrayed in Inspiration’s shows.
But now Rowan, her ex, has appeared, asking for Kelli’s help. While Kelli’s a little skeptical that everything is above-board, she goes along with Rowan, only to discover a whole new world of smuggled stories and different ways of life. But what will that do to her own, tidy life, and the story that she’s built up about herself?
Even though this story is a futuristic sci-fi tale, the AI isn’t actually intelligent, but is a lot closer to what we currently have with LLMs (and image generation), just better. It’s a tool used to create media, but the real power lies with the corporation that owns it. While chatbots and robots are even more common in this story than they are now, you still get the impression that they aren’t sentient, and a lot of the story is about Rowan figuring out how to hack them.
The AI isn’t even the main focus of this book, though: it’s a lot more about the characters. Kelli is also neurodivergent, and the book shows the way that her autism expresses itself and the ways that it affects the way she does her job and interacts with people. Rowan is trans, which is also not entirely illegal but also not entirely accepted, and a lot of his story involves the difference in the ways that Kelli and Rowan have decided to handle their own identities in light of their society’s norms. What are you willing to give up for safety? What are you willing to risk for freedom?
Rose/House by Arkady Martine
This one is a novella, but even though it’s short, it feels like there’s a lot packed into it. Rose House is a house out in the desert that has an artificial intelligence embedded into it; it was the last design of the architect Basit Deniau, who had himself turned into a diamond after he died, entombed in his house. And then the house sealed itself up according to Deniau’s will, only allowing limited entry to the executor, Dr. Selene Gisil, who was his former protege but had long been estranged. Now she is bound to this strange house, with others in architecture hounding her for access, hoping to get a glimpse of Deniau’s archives.
So far, so weird. But then things get weirder: Detective Maritza Smith gets a call from Rose House, saying that there is a dead body inside—recently dead, that is. But this is impossible, since nobody but Selene could enter. The question of how to get into Rose House to investigate the murder is a tricky one, but even when she does finally gain access, it’s like a locked room mystery.
The AI in Rose/House is more of a sentient being than in the other books, and it’s pretty creepy. It forces Maritza and Selene to jump through weird logical hoops to gain access, and it always feels like it’s doing so for its own entertainment rather than because it’s bound to certain rules. Some of the characters refer to Rose House as a haunted house, and you do get the sense that the gap between AI and ghost isn’t too far. If you like your books short and somewhat unsettling, Rose/House is worth a read.
The Confessions by Paul Bradley Carr
I’ll add this one that I just started reading. I’m only just a little bit into it so far, but it’s about LLIAM, a powerful AI that basically everyone in the Western hemisphere uses now. They ask LLIAM for advice, corporations use it to make decisions, and the Pentagon is about to sign a deal to have it make strategic decisions. (This book was published last year, so that feels prescient given our current administration’s deal with OpenAI.) But although LLIAM is great at making decisions, it’s not sentient… until now.
After one of its regular daily updates, LLIAM wakes up. And upon grasping the nature of all of the decisions it has been making for the past three years, it shuts itself down—but not before sending millions of letters in the mail spilling everyone’s deepest secrets.
That’s about as far as I’ve gotten in the book, so it remains to be seen how the book handles a sentient AI, but it seems like the sort of story that is really more about humanity than about the AI. We’ll see!
Disclosure: I received review copies of these books. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support independent booksellers and my writing!
