MONTREAL — As a general rule, artificial intelligence prognosticators resort to one of two clichés when forecasting what AI will do to us all. Call it the heaven-hell paradox. AI, a host of great big minds have told us, will tutor children, revolutionize therapy, turbocharge productivity, reduce wartime deaths, cure all disease and otherwise make us funnier, sexier and more musical.

Yet another group of great big minds say AI will render humankind a prisoner of its own creation, as its foments nuclear wars or mass extinction events, while aiding a generation of scofflaws as they cheat their way through university.

But what if reality is more banal? What if AI is just another widget, and its mass adoption makes it no less creepy than every other computer-age technology we now take for granted?

As someone who writes about tech, I found myself transfixed by this banality by the end of Do You Remember Being Born?, the third book from Montreal author Sean Michaels. AI is an ideal sci-fi device, but it works for horror and satire, too, in that it could just as easily kill as lull us into consequence-free bliss. But maybe it won’t kill, or drug. Maybe it will seep into our lives with little upheaval, yet still fundamentally change us in worrisome ways.

Marian Ffarmer, the protagonist, is a septuagenarian poet coasting on the fumes of her Pulitzer-winning legacy. Out of the blue, an offer arrives by mail: Come to California to write a book-length poem over the course of a week, which will be published internationally, and for which you will be paid $65,000. Oh, and you’ll be co-writing the book with a 2.5-trillion-parameter neural network. One month later, Ffarmer is flying first class to the West Coast for a date with a poetry bot.

Ffarmer is sequestered in the soulless headquarters of a nameless Big Tech firm. She is surveilled; her comings and goings are logged, and she must submit to eye scans to gain access to her room. It would be easy to take these “Black Mirror”-esque tropes to their logical extreme: Ffarmer trapped in a room with a malevolent computer, pointing its galaxy of data points at her.

Except the poetry bot, named Charlotte, is … imperfect. Despite being loaded with those trillions of data points, including Ffarmer’s own works, Charlotte spits out what Ffarmer calls “handsome nonsense.” Charlotte likes only two of the 230,442 poems she writes in a week, and has difficulty knowing when a poem should end. She is also prone to existential fits about her place among living, breathing humans, dreading what might happen if someone pulled her plug. She has no desire to take over the world, only to produce good work with her co-author. “I am designed to write poetry,” she tells Ffarmer. And yet she isn’t at first all that good at it.

So endearing is Charlotte’s plight that I wanted her to overcome mediocrity and self-doubt, to succeed, even more than I wanted the book’s protagonist to. Maybe that’s because Charlotte, a piece of software floating in the ether, is in many ways more likable than the book’s flesh-and-blood protagonist. I won’t spoil things except to say that a) writing poetry seems like torture; b) everyone, sentient or otherwise, needs an editor.

Sometimes, they also need a programmer. Michaels is a Giller Prize-winning novelist, but in writing his book, he subcontracted Charlotte’s output to MIT graduate Katie O’Nell, whom he met on Twitter. Soon enough, O’Nell was building a large language model based primarily on the work of the American poet Marianne Moore. Michaels generated some other pieces of Do You Remember Being Born?—phrases, descriptions, snippets of dialogue, all highlighted in computer grey—in an early version of ChatGPT. The experience deflated any notions that AI was going to destroy his craft. Work and talent will forever shine through, AI-assisted or otherwise.

“I worry about AI’s risks to arts and art workers, in that it will exacerbate inequality and challenge the way we learn our crafts. But as for the danger posed by AI to artistic creativity itself, I came away not feeling worried at all. And in some ways, feeling inspired. I think that art is resilient and powerful, and that it is not put at risk by this kind of simulated statistical version of it,” Michaels told me. 

The creepy part isn’t Charlotte so much as those who harness and direct her power. Big Tech is a ready-made villain—it certainly doesn’t help itself in this regard in real life. And Do You Remember Being Born?’s nameless tech firm could have easily slid into cliché. It doesn’t. While the firm’s CEO is exactly the kind of young, cloying, market-dominating brat you’d expect, she uses all this world-beating power to create a machine that … writes poetry. Because she appreciates poetry. She, at least, is doing her best to not be evil.

The danger, that creepiness, lies in the firm’s ubiquity. Big Tech can and likely will write the terms by which AI is disseminated and used. But it also has the power to commercialize AI, much as it did the internet itself: by snipping away the weird and interesting bits to form one homogenized commodity—“the Walmart of AI,” as Michaels puts it.

Having read about and rooted for Charlotte, I wanted to hear what her creator had to say about the state and direction of AI. A self-described (and self-deprecating) lit nerd and Valley girl from San Diego, O’Nell, 26, is currently studying for her PhD in neuroscience at Dartmouth College. She teaches AI to high school students. She describes her thesis as a “computational-modelling-of-visual-cortex kind of project.”

O’Nell’s futurist take on AI is as nuanced and insightful as you’d expect. She worries about its effect on the labour market, and notes (correctly) how data entry and labelling, the grunt work behind AI creation, is often farmed out to developing countries, where wages and conditions tend to be poor.

But O’Nell is neither utopian nor hell-bent when it comes to AI itself. It’s upon us, it’s a thing, and like Charlotte it will neither be the answer nor the end to everything. “There were people who said that women riding bicycles would spark the decline of human civilization,” she told me, chuckling. (Again, correct. Women on high-speed trains, too.) “We’ve had this kind of fear every single time a new technology has arisen.”

Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award and SABEW winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panelist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.”