Another Post About AI (this time with a twist)
This morning while I laid in bed relaxing on my day off, I opened up my RSS feed app to play catch-up after having not read anything in almost a month. There was a lot, and I skimmed or skipped most of it (which tells me I need to thin out my feed a bit), but I saw an interesting couple of posts about AI and people's relationships with fictional AI "characters" changing because of what's happening in tech right now with "AI".
Diel at Diel's daydreams wrote about common AI tropes in fiction and how their perspective of the villain characters in media such as the game Detroit: Become Human has become more sympathetic because of how Diel thinks of AI nowadays.
Cherry at Cherry's room responded to Diel's post, and talked about their change from thinking about fictional AIs as characters to thinking about them as objects.
Both posts kind of hit me because this past week I'd been thinking about the same thing, about how my opposition to AI has changed my perspective on fictional AI characters or tools, and about my use of them in stories.
I have two projects that have AI in them. The first is a novelette I wrote as part of a collaborative project with a few friends1, and the AI is only briefly mentioned. Within the context of the story, the characters have a big, repurposed military spaceship, and it has an AI system that helps facilitate control of the many systems in the big ship for the small crew. It's bland, has no personality or character of its own, and is only a tool mentioned in one or two sentences near the climax.
The second project with AI is different, though, because the whole thing is basically built around AI, but not in the way you think. This is an unfinished novel project I worked on during a novel-writing class in my graduate program, and at the time I was doing a lot more experimentation with form, and I hit a big brick wall with that aspect and wasn't able to finish because I couldn't get the form to work the way I wanted it to2. But the bare bones concept was the AI that controlled a big colony ship on the way to a new colony had disappeared from the virtual reality where it lived, and an amnesiac man within the VR and an apprentice VR technician accidentally stuck in the VR have to work together to figure out what happened to the AI and get things running again before the colony ship gets irrevocably off-course.
But what I find very interesting about this project when thinking about it now, with everything going on in the tech industry, is that my twist on the AI is that it cannot work without a human consciousness wired into it. There is no AI singularity where the AI becomes conscious in this universe, where characters like Data and Cortana and Ultron can come into existence as thinking and feeling characters. Instead, the abilities of an AI is connected to the humanity of a human consciousness, a volunteer who serves in this function for a set time period and is free once the contract is done. This creates a third kind of intelligence that has the computational power and speed of the "sci fi AI" to perform the complicated and expansive tasks (such as flying a colony ship) and the instinct, experience, and creativity of a human to turn it into actual intelligence rather than the statistics machine in the current tech industry.
And just writing this blog post has given me some new things to think about with the story, new angles and new concepts to explore with what I was trying to do. Who knows, maybe I'll break through my nearly year-long writer's block and finish the novel.
Thoughts to share? I have a contact page now!
There were three of us in a larger writing group. We called ourselves the Loons, because we were "loony" about trying to write novels as fast as possible. I wrote a full 60k novel in 3 weeks with this small group (and the help of the pandemic creating a 3-week-long spring break back in 2020). We kind of fell apart after trying this collaborative project because our styles didn't match at all. I was all serious sci fi with my novelette, and one of the others was very satirical/over-the-top silliness comedy sci fi based almost entirely on the backs of Animal Crossing characters, and the third in our group never actual wrote anything.↩
I was writing it in two points of view, one of them in 3rd person limited and the other in 1st person directed, which looks pretty much like 2nd person. It is very hard to write a story in 2nd person, and it is very rare to see in published works, outside of choose-your-own-adventure type stuff. It didn't really work the way I wanted it to. But the weird POV was tied to actual story reasons, so I kept trying to make it work. I still want it to work, but until I figure it out, it's on the back-burner.↩