Three distinct personalities, all female, walk into a bar together in Do You Remember Being Born? and emerge with fat paycheques, a collaborative long poem slyly titled “Self-portrait,” and a lot of nagging doubt. Actually, the proverbial bar in Sean Michaels’s dizzying new novel is not a bar but the Mind Studio, an entry-by-key-card-and-retina-scan-only room on an unnamed tech giant’s San Francisco campus. And one of the three personalities, a “2.5-trillion-parameter neural network” named Charlotte, is better described as feminine than female. But the doubt, tucked under a lot of surface-level optimism, is real, instilled in characters and readers alike by the author.
Small wonder Michaels is among the “digital-savvy slate of authors”—indeed, the only one mentioned by name in a Publishers Weekly press release—set to take part in a late-September publishing-industry webinar about AI’s expected impact. Before writing Do You Remember, the Montreal author and critic co-designed Moorebot, a piece of poetry-generation software animated by a literary corpus that includes the collected works of the celebrated American poet Marianne Moore (1887–1972) and an entire anthology of twenty-first-century Canadian poetry. Moorebot, in conjunction with OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model, is an essential co-author in Michaels’s collaborative novel about human–AI poetry collaboration: all the poetry contributed by Charlotte and some of the prose (indicated on the page by grey shading) were generated with its help.
