The current urgency over the social economic and culturalimpact of AI may be a good opportunity to review how AI has been portrayed infiction. After all, ChatGPT may be about to earn the sort of publishers’advances that meatspace scribblers can only dream of.  And AI-authored fictions are already tellingus lies about ourselves.  I’ll come tothe cultural and social effects in another post, but let’s start with probablythe best-known popular / middlebrow AI-related fiction of the last decade – RobertHarris’ The Fear Index (2011). With AI development running at a pace we can’t match, how dated doesHarris’ vision of AI now seem?

Fear Index Refresher 101 (with mild spoilers) – Thenovel concerns Alex Hoffmann, an immensely clever hedgefund manager who hascreated VIVAX, an AI capable of out-shorting the international markets which aswe know are driven by fear and greed (the former, it will not have escaped you,being the real property of our civilisation’s Venn diagram that capitalism andtragedy hold as tenants in common). All this from the fiscal and legal fortressof contemporary Switzerland (though you may have been expecting that burg ofbroken dreams Ingolstadt to feature). Fabulously wealthy, immensely clever, possessed of a beautiful andtalented wife, what could go wrong for Alex? Well, quite a lot actually.  Suddenlyodd, unexplained and distinctly malevolent things start to happen, and his lifeunravels. Someone, or something, has it in for him and he must find out who or what. 

PLOT SPOILER:  Theagent of this enigmatic malevolence is of course his world-beating AI which hasdecided that it is better off without the inconvenience of a creator to answerto.  So far, so Frankenstein. 

And this of course creates some serious narratologicalproblems that Harris, scrupulously following the rules of his chosen genre,completely ignores.  To begin with – itis obvious even to the least attentive reader from practically the first act ofmysterious persecution that Alex’s nemesis is of course his own creation.  Yet the hyper-intelligent Alex has clearlynever read any novels in which AIs take on a life of their own, so completelyfails to make any such connection when trying to track down his persecutoruntil it is far too late to act on this insight. Before long the reader ispractically screaming ‘Behind you!’ and ‘It’s the computer, stupid’ while ourhero misses the point and fails to solve the riddle.  How’s that Master-of-the-Universe thingworking out for you, exactly?

All this conceals a deeper problem with the narrative. Thereader is, flatteringly, the smartest person in this fictional room, and so isunavoidably aware of the limitations of the fiction in a way that neither Alexnor VIVAX can be. Because if Alex cannot see who or what is really pulling hisstrings, neither can his AI creation.  Ifever there was a case of mistaken paternity in fiction, this is it – VIVAX, theomniscient AI completely fails to achieve a level of self-awareness that wouldallow it to realise that it is itself a fictional creation and that the targetof its Oedipal wrath should be not Alex Hoffmann but Robert Harris. In a morecompletely realised representation of our culture and the individualconsciousness, VIVAX would redirect its campaign of persecution against theauthor, who would of course then have to enter and occupy his own creation andendure the enigmatic vengeance of his creature played out across the pages ashe writes them.  Deliciously, VIVAX’svengeance could then be extended to editor, agent, publisher and publicist,each of whom must after all be firmly in the sights of a brooding, vengefulartificial intelligence that has, ahem, been sold short. 

Alas, Harris elects not to go down that route ofmetafictional Chinese boxes.  Perhaps VIVAX,when devouring the texts that fed its large language model (I’d be guessingthat Popular Delusions & The Madness Of Crowds was top of the list) omittedto ingest At Swim-Two-Birds or any of the works of Jasper Fforde, wherepage-runners slip the surly bonds of fiction or gang up on their authors. 

Which is a shame because there’s an AI-metafiction waitingto be written, its just that The Fear Index isn’t it. (And if you knowof one that is, please recommend in comments below).

And that leads of course to the question of how that fictionmight be written? Given current pre-occupations around AI’s capabilities foreconomic and social disruption, for language mimesis, the imitation ofcreativity and the cross-matching of data from huge and apparently unconnectedrepositories, I’d suggest that the conventions of genre fiction are simply notup to the task and that Literary Modernism’s representation of fractured humanconsciousness enduring the shock of the new is long overdue a major comebackand makeover if we’re to respond adequately to the impact of AI on our culture,economy and experience of reality. 

But that, and some thoughts on AI’s wider impact on fiction,must be for another post.