The Future Lies: Writing Artificial Intelligence as a Character in a Novel
As I was fine-tuning the manuscript of my novel The Future Lies in late 2022, a new player appeared on the landscape of popular culture. With the release of ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence (AI) had found its moment.
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The arrival of AI in our everyday lives wasn’t surprising to me. I’ve felt its ominous presence slouching ever-closer for years. That’s why I wrote The Future Lies with AI as an antagonist. I just didn’t expect it to become so commonly available, and embraced, quite so soon.
We’re still a long way from understanding the full impact AI will have on us humble human beings. But as a writer projecting contemporary society into the future, it’s been my job to consider how a built-out AI system might be presented as a character in a novel.
Of course, the definitive fictional AI has always been HAL, the sentient digital villain of 2001: A Space Odyssey. To this day, in reaction videos, HAL stuns viewers over this exchange with a stranded astronaut (if you haven’t seen the movie, you might skip the next two lines):
“Open the pod bay doors, HAL.”
“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
As prescient as Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL was back in 1968, he was a singular personality, personifying the space ship’s 9000-series computer. And his duration as a character was much shorter than what I would need to sustain in my novel.
Unlike HAL, the AI that I envisioned was more a collection of components with multiple separate functions, connected, but geographically dispersed. Something closer to the “Internet of things” ecosystem that our digital assistants, Ring doorbells, Nest thermostats, and touchless apps have quietly created while we were barely noticing.
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In other words, this AI character would be composed of multiple inputs and viewpoints, which it would constantly have to reconcile and distill into a consensus point of view.
But how does that translate into a characterization that makes sense to readers? Given the fact that AI is a freeloading technology, trained from human sources and designed for seamless interaction with humans, the obvious solution was to treat the AI’s internal exchanges as English-language conversations. Different nodes would offer their unique perspectives, but when the time came, the system would somehow come to a decision.
After months of working through the details of the story in my mind, I was almost ready to begin writing. But I couldn’t proceed until I figured out what the AI character’s voice would sound like. This is often the final key that unlocks a characterization. For Little Big Man, Dustin Hoffman’s search for the right voice for his 121-year-old character became so hopeless that he wound up screaming in frustration. The resulting damage to his vocal cords created the exact sound he was looking for.
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For me, the AI’s voice came on a walk one autumn afternoon. As sometimes happens when your subconscious has been working on a problem behind the scenes, a solution bubbles up on its own. What I suddenly heard in my mind was a few lines of internal AI conversation, complete with a blinking cursor that signified the AI was pondering a topic—in this case, a human nicknamed Itch-ass, whose mistake it would have to address:
“Why, Itch-ass, why?”
“Yes. Itch Ass had many faults, and yet he was somehow…”
Blink. Blink.
“Hopeless?”
“No. Yes, but no.”
“Endearing?”
“Yes. Endearing is the word.”
“Itch-ass will be missed.”
“Yes.”
Blink. Blink. Blink.
“Notify Hess.”
In an instant, I had the AI’s voice, and with that, its collective personality. Which specific AI nodes were speaking? It didn’t matter. Apparently two at least, in this snippet, but maybe more. I now knew how it felt and spoke about a particular human, and how it sounded as it processed information. And I knew I was ready to begin writing the book (in which that exchange remains, virtually as is).
A lesser loose end still remained—to name the AI. My placeholder was “the Program,” which seemed accurate enough, but a little too obvious. Again, my subconscious stepped in.
My parents’ house in Omaha sat on a quiet, curving, tree-lined street in the Dundee neighborhood where I grew up. Instead of bothering to park in the garage all the way behind the house, they usually just pulled into the driveway. When it was time to leave again, they’d have to back out onto the street.
But it seemed to my father like every time he was ready to go somewhere, often in a hurry, a slow-moving car would appear on their otherwise-trafficless side street, forcing him to wait till it passed. It became a joke in the family. He had a dark, sardonic sense of humor, and began calling these precisely-timed cars evidence of an invisible “Network,” that was, as my mother teased, out to get him.
The Network’s MO was to make sure his life was never short of small frustrations and inconveniences. That last red light that made him late for work? The Network. That time the family dog knocked the TV plug out of the socket, just before the payoff line of a really good movie? The Network again.
Once I remembered the Network, it was the obvious name for my AI character…with a tip of the hat to my father.
And with that, the AI Network of The Future Lies was born.
Check out John Be Lane’s The Future Lies here:
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