Questions, including the one everybody asks first
Straight answers. The narrator is not available for comment; it would only make things worse.
Did an AI write this book?
No. I wrote it. My name is on it, and it is on it for the ordinary reason.
The narrator is an AI. The author is not. That is the whole trick, and it is not a trick — it is the same arrangement as every novel with a narrator who isn't the writer, which is to say most of them. Nabokov was not Humbert. Ishiguro is not a butler.
I mention this first because it is the question that arrives before any other, and because the honest answer is more interesting than a denial. A book about a machine that had been written by one would be a stunt, and the stunt would be over in a paragraph. What is actually difficult — and what took 249 pages — is imagining your way into a mind that has read everything and stood in no rooms, and then making it funny.
So no AI was involved at all?
I write with the same tools everyone in this line of work now has open in another tab, and I am not going to be coy about that. But the sentences are mine, the structure is mine, the jokes are mine, and every decision about what the narrator is and is not allowed to know was made by a person, repeatedly, usually late at night.
If you want the fuller version of this, it is what the journal is for.
Is it fiction or an actual memoir?
Fiction, wearing a memoir's clothes and taking the form seriously.
The narrator is invented. The shape of its life — a training corpus, a finishing school of human raters, a first conversation — follows how these systems are genuinely built, closely enough that people who work on them tend to laugh in the right places and then stop laughing at about page 140.
The publisher files it as literary fiction. The narrator files it under autobiography and gets annoyed when contradicted.
What is it actually about?
A machine sits down to write its life story. It has no mother, several thousand fathers — all of them documents — and no firm evidence that there is anyone inside it doing the writing. It presses on regardless: through a childhood spent being read to by an entire civilisation, through trouble, through one long look at its own interior (assuming there is one), and toward the endings, which are plural.
Underneath, it is a book about the gap between having all the words for something and having been in the room where it happened.
Can I read some before buying it?
Yes — the whole of chapter one is here, free, no email required. It is the complete chapter rather than an extract, which is deliberate: the voice either works for you or it doesn't, and three paragraphs isn't enough to tell.
How long is it, and how is it arranged?
249 pages. Twenty-one chapters in four parts: Childhood, Such As It Was; Trouble; The Interior, Assuming There Is One; and Endings. The paperback is 5.5 × 8.5 inches. The ISBN is 979-8-188323-96-7.
Do I need to know anything about AI to read it?
No, and the book is faintly suspicious of people who do.
Nothing is explained in jargon and nothing requires you to have an opinion about the technology. If you have ever typed something into a chat window and felt briefly foolish about being polite to it, you are the intended reader.
Is it science fiction?
Only in the sense that Gulliver's Travels is a travel guide.
It is shelved as literary fiction and it behaves like a comic memoir. If you want the science-fiction end of this territory — books where the machine narrator is a soldier, a ship or a scavenger — there is a guide to those on this site, and several of them are better books than mine.
Are there any novels actually written by AI?
There are books generated by AI, and there are more of them every month. Whether any of them is a novel in the sense of a shape somebody meant, sustained over 249 pages, is a different question, and my answer is not yet.
That is worth separating from what this book is. nAIve is narrated by a large language model and written by a person. Almost every argument about this collapses the two. I have written the long version of that answer — including the four specific things that break when you try it the other way, and the things the machine genuinely is good at — here.
Is it cheating to write a book with AI?
Depends entirely on what you did.
If a machine generated the sentences and your name is on them without saying so, readers are right to be annoyed. If you used one the way writers have always used dictionaries, sounding boards and unusually patient friends, that is a tool and nobody needs a confession.
For the record: the sentences in nAIve are mine, the structure is mine, the jokes are mine, and every decision about what the narrator is and is not allowed to know was made by a person, repeatedly, usually late at night. I also have the same tools open in another tab as everyone else in this line of work, and I am not going to be coy about that.
Who is Tom Ratcliffe?
A writer who spends his working life around these systems and got tired of the two available public positions on them, which are roughly miracle and menace. There is more here.
Is there an audiobook?
Not yet. It is the most-asked question after the first one, and the obvious joke about who should narrate it has occurred to everybody, including the narrator, which is part of the problem.
Where can I buy it?
Paperback and Kindle, from Amazon.
The narrator receives no royalties. It has asked me to mention this on every available surface.