Reminds me of the Primer from Neal Stephenson's A Diamond Age. Passage from Nell's first experience with the Primer:<p>The book spoke in a lovely contralto, with an accent like the very finest Vickys. The voice was like a real person's- though not like anyone Nell had ever met. It rose and fell like slow surf on a warm beach, and when Nell closed her eyes, it swept her out into an ocean of feelings.<p>"Once upon a time there was a little Princess named Nell who was imprisoned in a tall dark castle on an island in the middle of a great sea, with a little boy named Harv, who was her friend and protector. She also had four special friends named Dinosaur, Duck, Peter Rabbit, and Purple. Princess Nell and Harv could not leave the Dark Castle, but from time to time a raven would come to visit them..."<p>"What's a raven?" Nell said.<p>The illustration was a colorful painting of the island seen from up in the sky. The island rotated downward and out of the picture, becoming a view toward the ocean horizon. In the middle was a black dot. The picture zoomed in on the black dot, and it turned out to be a bird. Big letters appeared beneath. "R A V E N," the book said. "Raven. Now, say it with me."
E.M. Forster's short story "The Machine Stops":<p>“Beware of first-hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. “First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then
they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine — the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that En charmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution....."
Accelerando by Charles Stross. There's no clear cut pre-AI/post-AI delineation. It's a gradual set of changes where one day you find yourself in a post-AI world and you've somehow made peace with that along the way, but you're not exactly sure when that happened or how.
Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky (third book in the Children of Time series)<p>While not a book about an AI like chatGPT explicitly, it does feature some birds whose minds work a lot like how chatGPTs AI seems to work.<p>The Children of Time series' books all describe a far away future in which some animals have evolved to be about equally intelligent as humans… but each each of the animals described in the book develops an intelligence that is somehow unique, and usually embodies some sort of adaptation that those animals have today.<p>In the third book, the author introduces a type of bird whose intelligence is a sort of an organic data gathering and data regurgitation parroting (pun intended). The way he describes their intelligence is quite similar to how chatGPT seems to work (at least as far as I understand it anyways).<p>Viewing the those birds as being similar to chatGPT and seeing how they interact with their world is a fun idea to hold in your head while reading the book.<p>While the birds are the most like chatGPT, the books also feature other animals whose hypothetical intelligence we have some interesting aspects of what AI can do as well. There is even an AI in the books! Although it is quite different than chatGPT or any other AI today.<p>The books are an amazing exploration of what other types of sentience could look like. I can’t recommend them enough! They really stretch the imagination.<p>Credit where it is due: I was not the one to notice the parallel between the birds and chatGPT, Ezra Klein made the observation in a podcast interview with the author.<p>(edits: typos, capitalization)
[No spoilers] This was a bit of a mind bender for me:<p>I was halfway through "Revelation Space" by Alastair Reynolds when ChatGPT was released. Throughout the book, it is common for characters to use natural language to delegate technical tasks to AI helpers, and then review the results later.<p>As somebody who does a lot of technical work and had hands-on experience with GPT-2 this seemed quite implausible. A few months ago I couldn't just instruct an AI to go find X and Y and then calculate Z and show me a visualization of that.<p>But now with copilot, Bing, ChatGPT, et al this is a pretty standard task! Using natural language to instruct an AI to find some information or write a first rough draft of some code is no longer some far-future fiction.<p>The timing with ChatGPT dropping when I was halfway through the book meant that one of the elements of its world went from feeling very "sci-fi" to being quite ordinary. o_0
I forgot to mention.... I asked the same question to ChatGPT. Here goes the answer:<p>Q: Can you think of a sci-fi novel that feels like ChatGPT now?<p>A: One sci-fi novel that comes to mind is "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. The novel explores the idea of consciousness and artificial intelligence, and the protagonist is a genetically modified human who has been wired to communicate with machines. The novel delves into the concept of the mind as a kind of information processing system, and the limitations of human understanding in a universe that may be fundamentally alien to us. The themes of consciousness, communication, and the limitations of human understanding are all relevant to the way ChatGPT functions and operates.
There's reference in Robert Silverberg's "The World Inside" of prompting the database in reference to knowledge workers. The phrase/wording paraphrased was "...needed to word it just right to get the information from the system"...
"Feed (2002) is a young adult dystopian novel of the cyberpunk subgenre written by M. T. Anderson. The novel focuses on issues such as corporate power, consumerism, information technology, data mining, and environmental decay, with a sometimes sardonic, sometimes somber tone.<p>From the first-person perspective of a teen boy, the book takes place in a near-futuristic American culture completely dominated by advertising and corporate exploitation, corresponding to the enormous popularity of internetworking brain implants."
Not a novel, there was a movie called "Her" around 10 years ago. The man fell in love with a Chatbot. iirc He also used the Chatbot to do some writing.
Rule 34 by charlie stross. It's a very near future scifi involving ai in a somewhat different way than normal. The author is on hn with the username cstross.