★★★☆☆ Meh...

I am AI

Ai Jiang

I picked this up because it was nominated for the 2024 best novelette Hugo award. I was disappointed.

So, here's a story you've heard before: someone invents something new. This new technology enables all kinds of stuff that was not possible before. There are winners and losers. The winners become powerful and rich, and they oppress the losers. Many people are unhappy, and human spirits are crushed. Then maybe, just maybe, a hero arises who, through the power of her humanity and art and soup redresses the injustice. (OK, I admit the soup part may be a novel touch.) Or maybe that doesn't happen, and we never get back what was lost. The horses don't return to the stables, hand-copied books very nearly vanish from the Earth...

This is an old story. It dates back at least to the people who realized they could plant seeds and later harvest food, instead of the natural way, which is to find food growing wild. Soup was involved. It's a true story.

Ai Jiang's I Am AI: A Novelette is that story again. Of course, the technology in question is AI. Jiang is not wrong, but I Am AI is not particularly insightful, or substantially different from the many other times this story has been told, or has happened in history.

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