What do you think?
Rate this book
Parallel Realities: A Turing Fiction
Can you separate human from AI?
Discover Dawson Reid's thrilling journey as he navigates through concurrent storylines in a world of AI and brain implants. Explore questions of humanity and reality with a unique blend of human-written & AI-written sections, can you distinguish between them? Get ready to challenge your perceptions with this thought-provoking novel.
Description
Dawson Reid’s world is turned upside down when microchips are implanted in his brain following a head injury, granting him access to AI technology. As he navigates through concurrent storylines—one of rehabilitation with his father in a futuristic NYC, and the other in a mysterious hospital with the doctor who implanted the chips—Dawson’s abilities increase, but so do his struggles with paranoia and schizophrenia. The novel raises thought-provoking questions about humanity and the implications of using brain implants and AI to enhance human capabilities. With a unique blend of AI-written and human-written sections, readers are challenged to uncover the contributor of each written segment, following Dawson as he seeks to separate human and machine, reality, and imagination.
Discover Dawson Reid's thrilling journey as he navigates through concurrent storylines in a world of AI and brain implants. Explore questions of humanity and reality with a unique blend of human-written & AI-written sections, can you distinguish between them? Get ready to challenge your perceptions with this thought-provoking novel.
Description
Dawson Reid’s world is turned upside down when microchips are implanted in his brain following a head injury, granting him access to AI technology. As he navigates through concurrent storylines—one of rehabilitation with his father in a futuristic NYC, and the other in a mysterious hospital with the doctor who implanted the chips—Dawson’s abilities increase, but so do his struggles with paranoia and schizophrenia. The novel raises thought-provoking questions about humanity and the implications of using brain implants and AI to enhance human capabilities. With a unique blend of AI-written and human-written sections, readers are challenged to uncover the contributor of each written segment, following Dawson as he seeks to separate human and machine, reality, and imagination.
- GenresScience Fiction
338 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 15, 2023
3 people are currently reading
678 people want to read
About the author
K.R. Simms
1 book4 followersK.R. Simms is a contemporary author writing psycho suspense, philosophical sci-fi, and literary fiction. K.R. experiments with the use of AI and other innovative tech in his writing and was the first to create a Turing Fiction novel.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
June 25, 2023
K.R. Simms's
Parallel Realities: A Turing Fiction
builds on an interesting concept. With a new brain implant embedded with advanced AI to assist his recovery from a severe brain injury, the main character struggles through multiple concurrent "realities" to sort out what's really going on, along the way touching on many possible implications the growing use of advancing AI could have on human society.
Unfortunately, for me at least, multiple shortcomings of the implementation outweigh the interestingness of these motivating ideas.
The narration throughout felt clumsy and often repetative as might a quick middle-school first draft. Frequent scene contradictions stuck out as sloppy and distracting—a character walks the sidewalk in a new-to-him city alongside a five-story building while describing details about its flat rooftop; a character follows a path around the city perimeter until stopping in the city's center—like cognitive speedbumps along the way, also suggesting the author hasn't really thought out the details of the story.
One could assume that only a generative AI model would make such inconsistency mistakes and thus the clumsier parts must've been among those written by the co-authoring AI, but that seems a weak excuse to me. I've read poorly written books with these same sorts of issues and no AI involvement, and if the AI used isn't ready to produce narration that isn't riddled with these kinds of errors, then it isn't ready to produce this sort of a book.
Meanwhile, various scenes along the way add commentary on possible effects increasing use of advanced AI might have on various elements of life, from policing to courts to fiction and performance art and more, perhaps too many to try to address in one story without feeling forced. Assorted other concepts are also introduced as AI-assisted skills to level-up the main character, such as emotional intelligence and pattern recognition as predictive and manipulative tools, and something along the lines of Zen acceptance. However, all of these elements are hugely simplistic, almost cartoonish characatures of themselves, as though written by someone who's heard of these concepts but doesn't really understand any of them.
The book's description asks if the reader can separate human-written from AI-written. Honestly, I lost interest in the question because it was all equally poorly written.
Finally, the story just ends on a sort of step forward but no real resolution. I suspect it may have been going for an open-but-dismal 1984 -like ending (and/or perhaps a touch inspired by that of the 2012 TV series Awake), but if so the pieces just don't hold up strongly enough to deliver it.
Overall, I think the author has some interesting ideas to ponder, but for multiple reasons had great difficultly weaving together a coherent story that illustrates them all in any meaningful way. The result just doesn't work for me.
To be fair, the book's copyright page calls it a "beta edition", so perhaps it has some awareness of the need for further iterative training of both authors' learning and generative models?
Unfortunately, for me at least, multiple shortcomings of the implementation outweigh the interestingness of these motivating ideas.
The narration throughout felt clumsy and often repetative as might a quick middle-school first draft. Frequent scene contradictions stuck out as sloppy and distracting—a character walks the sidewalk in a new-to-him city alongside a five-story building while describing details about its flat rooftop; a character follows a path around the city perimeter until stopping in the city's center—like cognitive speedbumps along the way, also suggesting the author hasn't really thought out the details of the story.
One could assume that only a generative AI model would make such inconsistency mistakes and thus the clumsier parts must've been among those written by the co-authoring AI, but that seems a weak excuse to me. I've read poorly written books with these same sorts of issues and no AI involvement, and if the AI used isn't ready to produce narration that isn't riddled with these kinds of errors, then it isn't ready to produce this sort of a book.
Meanwhile, various scenes along the way add commentary on possible effects increasing use of advanced AI might have on various elements of life, from policing to courts to fiction and performance art and more, perhaps too many to try to address in one story without feeling forced. Assorted other concepts are also introduced as AI-assisted skills to level-up the main character, such as emotional intelligence and pattern recognition as predictive and manipulative tools, and something along the lines of Zen acceptance. However, all of these elements are hugely simplistic, almost cartoonish characatures of themselves, as though written by someone who's heard of these concepts but doesn't really understand any of them.
The book's description asks if the reader can separate human-written from AI-written. Honestly, I lost interest in the question because it was all equally poorly written.
Finally, the story just ends on a sort of step forward but no real resolution. I suspect it may have been going for an open-but-dismal 1984 -like ending (and/or perhaps a touch inspired by that of the 2012 TV series Awake), but if so the pieces just don't hold up strongly enough to deliver it.
Overall, I think the author has some interesting ideas to ponder, but for multiple reasons had great difficultly weaving together a coherent story that illustrates them all in any meaningful way. The result just doesn't work for me.
To be fair, the book's copyright page calls it a "beta edition", so perhaps it has some awareness of the need for further iterative training of both authors' learning and generative models?
April 6, 2023
A pretty decent read. *spoiler* I wish it would have wrapped up better at the end as I'm still perplexed at which reality was real.
March 17, 2023
This was a GoodReads giveaway win of a Kindle ebook.
Not my writing style. But the more problematic start for myself was the author claim that it was co-written using AI software. I was okay with that concept, but felt by telling me up front, too much of my attention was focused on trying to differentiate between the two. It proved to be too great of a distraction and impacted my overall enjoyment of the book. Personally, I would have rather found out about the AI component after the fact and then I might have been more inclined to re-read to sort it all out.
I did expect a bit of jumping back and forth between worlds as the book title implied. I did not think it worked for me. Likely due to the overall writing style which could have been more of a personal taste issue for me.
Don't let my opinion dissuade you. Give this book a try. It may be your next GoodReads.
Not my writing style. But the more problematic start for myself was the author claim that it was co-written using AI software. I was okay with that concept, but felt by telling me up front, too much of my attention was focused on trying to differentiate between the two. It proved to be too great of a distraction and impacted my overall enjoyment of the book. Personally, I would have rather found out about the AI component after the fact and then I might have been more inclined to re-read to sort it all out.
I did expect a bit of jumping back and forth between worlds as the book title implied. I did not think it worked for me. Likely due to the overall writing style which could have been more of a personal taste issue for me.
Don't let my opinion dissuade you. Give this book a try. It may be your next GoodReads.
May 15, 2023
Since reading a few articles about open AI chat bots (one said it wanted to “escape” and had a “plan”), I have become a bit paranoid. Nevertheless, I thought it would be easy to discern the AI-generated chapters in K. R. Simms’s Parallel Realities. But it wasn’t. I started the book as if I were taking a test (ha, a Turing test!), so I wasn’t concerned with any emotional investment.
Simms includes sections wholly written by an AI, “a conversational AI system that listens, learns, and challenges,” or I have to assume he did. The narration is somewhat choppy and clunky throughout, so I wasn’t sure which segments were human-written first drafts or AI-generated. And, unfortunately, I was sometimes distracted by contradictions in the narration.
But aside from the initial challenge, the novel eventually provided my rational examination with many intriguing potentials in AI-human interactions: in government, law, and of course human relations. Trust is important in human relations, and that’s precisely what the main character doesn’t have -- with an AI-implant in his brain to save him from a catastrophic brain injury, he doesn’t know whether his “experiences” with his father and his doctor, among others, are “real” or not.
So for me Parallel Realities is about someone becoming extremely paranoid because he can’t determine real from manufactured experiences, read by a person already somewhat paranoid about AI who can’t determine the human from the manufactured prose.
Great Cover!
I received an early review copy from Librarything. This is an honest review.
Simms includes sections wholly written by an AI, “a conversational AI system that listens, learns, and challenges,” or I have to assume he did. The narration is somewhat choppy and clunky throughout, so I wasn’t sure which segments were human-written first drafts or AI-generated. And, unfortunately, I was sometimes distracted by contradictions in the narration.
But aside from the initial challenge, the novel eventually provided my rational examination with many intriguing potentials in AI-human interactions: in government, law, and of course human relations. Trust is important in human relations, and that’s precisely what the main character doesn’t have -- with an AI-implant in his brain to save him from a catastrophic brain injury, he doesn’t know whether his “experiences” with his father and his doctor, among others, are “real” or not.
So for me Parallel Realities is about someone becoming extremely paranoid because he can’t determine real from manufactured experiences, read by a person already somewhat paranoid about AI who can’t determine the human from the manufactured prose.
Great Cover!
I received an early review copy from Librarything. This is an honest review.
February 9, 2025
This book is billed as a psycho-mystery that explores the possibility of AI implants rewriting some of the human experience.
The protagonist, Dawson, undergoes a major brain injury. The only way to help him have any kind of meaningful life is to implant an ai-on-a-chip in his brain to help him.
The book takes us through is journey from his perspective as the AI seems to modify his perception of reality, giving him experiences of multiple realities with no control of his shifting between them.
Another aspect of this book is that an AI wrote sections of it. I’ve been playing with several ai available on the web, it is clearly beyond what I have access to, yet I think this task is a bit premature. I found it’s writing poor, it almost always uses the present tense where, although it seems grammatically correct, it feels unnatural and uncolloquial. It is overly repetitive and doesn’t grasp human nature. For instance, on female character repeatedly covers her mouth every time she laughs or blushes, several times in a few pages. I can’t speak of the author, whom I haven’t read nor heard of before, who may have been writing down to the level of the AI to make the book more homogeneous. In any case, it could have done with a good editor.
I did find the story itself interesting enough to work through the book. It is a fairly easy and quick read, but not one I’d recommend.
The protagonist, Dawson, undergoes a major brain injury. The only way to help him have any kind of meaningful life is to implant an ai-on-a-chip in his brain to help him.
The book takes us through is journey from his perspective as the AI seems to modify his perception of reality, giving him experiences of multiple realities with no control of his shifting between them.
Another aspect of this book is that an AI wrote sections of it. I’ve been playing with several ai available on the web, it is clearly beyond what I have access to, yet I think this task is a bit premature. I found it’s writing poor, it almost always uses the present tense where, although it seems grammatically correct, it feels unnatural and uncolloquial. It is overly repetitive and doesn’t grasp human nature. For instance, on female character repeatedly covers her mouth every time she laughs or blushes, several times in a few pages. I can’t speak of the author, whom I haven’t read nor heard of before, who may have been writing down to the level of the AI to make the book more homogeneous. In any case, it could have done with a good editor.
I did find the story itself interesting enough to work through the book. It is a fairly easy and quick read, but not one I’d recommend.
July 2, 2023
The premise of this book is for the reader to figure out whether a paragraph, chapter, or section, was written by the author or by AI.
The protagonist has been in an accident and had an AI chip implanted in his brain in order to save his life. The result of this chip implant is to cause a split in his consciousness or schizophrenic break. One of his lives is “real” and the other is an artificial construct lived purely in his imagination.
While I’m intrigued by the idea unfortunately the story construction was clumsy enough that I had trouble following it. In addition, the writing didn’t keep me interested or invested in the outcome. Honestly, I was bored enough with the story that I didn’t care which part was written by the author and which part was AI. I was just relieved that I'd finally finished the book.
In the interest of full disclosure, I received this book in exchange for a fair review.
The protagonist has been in an accident and had an AI chip implanted in his brain in order to save his life. The result of this chip implant is to cause a split in his consciousness or schizophrenic break. One of his lives is “real” and the other is an artificial construct lived purely in his imagination.
While I’m intrigued by the idea unfortunately the story construction was clumsy enough that I had trouble following it. In addition, the writing didn’t keep me interested or invested in the outcome. Honestly, I was bored enough with the story that I didn’t care which part was written by the author and which part was AI. I was just relieved that I'd finally finished the book.
In the interest of full disclosure, I received this book in exchange for a fair review.
December 15, 2023
This book had a very interesting idea behind it and the storyline was well executed for the most part. In the into, it explains that the book was written using AI technology and challenges the reader to try to distinguish between which parts are human written versus AI written. Overall, it was an interesting book and kept me reading all the way through. There were some typos and areas where grammar didn't align, but for the most part that didn't overtake the reading. It's a good book for those who like somewhat of a mystery an don't mind an ending that doesn't necessarily answer all of your questions. It was an interesting idea and worth a quick read.
This book was won in a Goodreads giveaway.
This book was won in a Goodreads giveaway.
March 11, 2023
Part of this book was generated by AI, and part was written by a human author. It's up to the reader to determine which is which. With the increased use of AI, this book shows just how much AI can dominate our lives.
Could it be that Dawson's experience could be like anybody's who ends up with a brain injury?
When George Orwell wrote 1984, people couldn't envision that it could really be like he depicted it in the book. However, we have all seen some form of 1984 become reality. Now with AI as depicted in Parallel Realities, could we see the destruction of humanity - and the complete dominance of AI as reality?
Could it be that Dawson's experience could be like anybody's who ends up with a brain injury?
When George Orwell wrote 1984, people couldn't envision that it could really be like he depicted it in the book. However, we have all seen some form of 1984 become reality. Now with AI as depicted in Parallel Realities, could we see the destruction of humanity - and the complete dominance of AI as reality?
April 23, 2023
This book poses a question to the reader - Which parts are written by AI and which are written by a human author? Dawson is in an accident and is given an AI implant to help him recover. But what is reality?
I really enjoyed this book, because it's all about perspective and acceptance. Dawson's "realities" are all he has, and the ending is a downer, but there are other ways of "living." In the end, I didn't care what parts were AI or a human author, but that's just me. The story was good, and I felt for Dawson.
I really enjoyed this book, because it's all about perspective and acceptance. Dawson's "realities" are all he has, and the ending is a downer, but there are other ways of "living." In the end, I didn't care what parts were AI or a human author, but that's just me. The story was good, and I felt for Dawson.
June 3, 2025
Well, first, let me say I completely failed at figuring out which parts were written by a human and which ones not. That said, it was an interesting story. I tried to figure out which reality was Dawson's real and which was computer fakery. I failed at that as well. All this failing means the book is a success as far as I'm concerned. I wonder if there'll be a breakdown in the final print edition? I did spot a few spelling/grammatical errors, but couldn't tell if they were the fault of the writing program or us good ol' fallible humans. Well done.
May 17, 2023
Interesting but confusing
I kept reading this story to try to find out what was happening with the main character but was disappointed to have no answer in the end. I believe the writer was trying to leave it open to interruption- but I much prefer having an actual answer.
I won this book through a goodreads.com giveaway.
I kept reading this story to try to find out what was happening with the main character but was disappointed to have no answer in the end. I believe the writer was trying to leave it open to interruption- but I much prefer having an actual answer.
I won this book through a goodreads.com giveaway.
April 7, 2023
What is real?
This was amazing. Part AI, part author. They blended so seamlessly that I don’t know where one ended and the other began. Bouncing between “realities” but never knowing where you truly are. Not sure who is real, who you can trust. Amazing story!
#GoodreadsGiveaway
This was amazing. Part AI, part author. They blended so seamlessly that I don’t know where one ended and the other began. Bouncing between “realities” but never knowing where you truly are. Not sure who is real, who you can trust. Amazing story!
#GoodreadsGiveaway
November 27, 2023
Amazing book, story was captivating and thrilling.
June 3, 2024
Excellent idea, great plot and story line. However the writing was irritatingly overblown. DNF
January 27, 2025
This fictional novel is definitely a fav pick for sure! It takes you on a journey of suspense and curiosity as you read along to find out what will happen next with Dawson. The creative way of writing while incorporating AI is genius. It stimulates emotion of anxiousness in an exciting way as you read each page. Hands down worth a read.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews