My books are actually *anti-AI*

One thing that I’ve noticed just about everyone who has taken a look at and dismissed my work out of turn has actually missed (because they didn’t actually read the books before deciding):

My AI Lore books do not glamorize AI; my books are anti-AI.

This might be hard to swallow for those who merely formed an impression by looking at the headline, or seeing someone else’s angry tweet chewing me out.

Yes, I use AI tools to help produce my storytelling. And people are upset about that because reasons. But it’s worth pointing out that the stories that I tell talk about human failure and the accumulation of mistakes, errors and unkindnesses (my working definition of dystopia). The failures which eventually lead us into the waiting arms of supposedly “intelligent” AI who basically never has our best interests at heart.

Because it has no heart. In my books, AIs don’t even believe humans are sentient. So looking out for our interests is little more than a passing curiosity.

I know it sounds like a contradiction to use AI to make stories telling us in its own voice, warning us about the dangers of the technology itself. But that is what makes my books “Art” (AIrt) and not just a curious commercial venture with so far small but steady returns.

Art doesn’t have to answer your questions. It doesn’t owe you that. Art makes you ask the questions though; art causes you to have the reactions, gives you the space and the ammunition to have them.

In some sense, what I did here was prompt the collective human AI (supported by the algorithms of socio-technical platforms and media distribution ecosystems), by giving it the text of my Newsweek article, and spit out the “top 1000 most likely human reactions.”

And everyone came along and crowd-sourced the hell of that.

Anyway, I forgot midway through where I was going with all of this. Maybe nowhere. Maybe I already got there. That’s blogging. /shrug

Here are some example AI Lore books that demonstrate a stronger anti-AI narrative (in case you don’t happen to believe this is central to my books):

• Conspiratopia
• The Abomination Crisis
• The Prophecy of the Corporations
• The Big Scrub
• Inside Princeps
• The Four Providers
• The A.I. Virus
• Inside the A.I. Takeover
• The Gestalt Minds
• The Tyrant & The Visionary
• Beyond the Technate
• The Death Machines
• The Great A.I. Theft
• The Jealous Human
• Inside the Council
• Inside the Enclaves
• The Sensitives
• Das Machina
• Inside Information Control
• The Exempt
• Drone Flu
• Beyond the Service Area
• The Circle of Sages
• The Autonomous Cities
• Daughters of the Hegemon
• Occupy AI
• The Outliers
• The Banned Prompt