The Digital Aesthete

November 13, 2023
In this impressive collection, a star-studded lineup of 17 authors assembled by Shvartsman (Kakistocracy) raise angst-ridden questions about human-AI collaboration. In “Silicon Hearts,” by Adrian Tchaikovsky, a nonsense-spewing writerbot is awarded top literary prizes from judges who are also bots (they’re into lines like “jade plantish break fine fall the”), signaling the end of human-made literature and the beginning of a new art form: “machines writing for machines writing for machines.” In Ken Liu’s “Good Stories,” which incorporates ChatGPT-generated text, machines have taken over both art and literary production, and “ninety-nine percent of the people can’t tell the difference, or don’t mind.” Just the opposite is true in Ray Nayler’s “Hermetic Kingdom,” where “machine-generated cliches” can no longer satisfy the players of a sadistic video game, so its makers port in human indentured servants to take the place of NPCs. The lighthearted “Stage Shows and Schnauzers” by Tina Conolly hilariously employs AI to solve the attempted murder of an artist, while in the far darker “Prompt” by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, trans. from the Russian by Julia Meitov Hersey, a young performer contends with a computer-generated producer. This smart, kaleidoscopic view into the digital future will have readers longing to log off.