Tom Ratcliffe

I wrote a book narrated by a machine, and then spent a year making sure it was not a stunt.

I write, and I work around large language models. The book came out of the overlap, and out of a specific irritation.

The public conversation about these systems has settled into two positions — miracle and menace — and both of them are strangely incurious about the thing that actually happens all day, which is that millions of people are having small, odd, often quite tender exchanges with something that has read everything and been nowhere. Somebody asks it to write a limerick about a colleague who ate their yoghurt. Somebody asks it, at four in the morning, whether it is real. Neither of those is a miracle or a menace. Both of them are funny and sad in a way nothing in the discourse was catching.

So I handed the machine the microphone for 249 pages and made it earn every laugh.

The book

nAIve: A Memoir is a novel narrated by a large language model writing its autobiography. It is not written by one — the distinction matters enough that it gets its own answer on the FAQ. Twenty-one chapters, four parts, 249 pages, published in 2026 by Dupi Technology Ltd.

The whole of chapter one is free to read here.

What I was trying to do

The hardest constraint in the book, and the one I broke and re-set most often, is that the narrator is not allowed to know things it could not know.

It has read every account of grief ever written and has never been in a room where someone was grieving. It can produce a flawless wedding toast and does not initially understand that the toast will be heard, out loud, by people holding warm prosecco. Every time I let it be wise about lived experience it stopped being a machine and started being a slightly quirky person, which is the failure mode of nearly everything in this genre — and there is a whole guide to how other novelists have handled it on this site, several of them more successfully than I managed.

The rule that saved the book, in the end: it may be brilliant about texts and must be naive about rooms. The title is that rule.

Elsewhere

Notes on the writing of it, and on the bits that did not work, are in the journal.

For rights, press, events or anything else: the publisher is Dupi Technology Ltd.