I picked this book up at the library as it was a Staff Pick with a striking cover and had a Douglas Coupland blurb on the back. If I had known it was about AI I perhaps would have left it on the shelf, but I stuck with it and enjoyed the book overall.
The book is written from the perspective of an elderly poet (apparently based on Marianne Moore – I’m not familiar with them or their work) and large portions are conversations with a LLM. I was distracted by the juxtaposition of the author writing as both a poet and a computer and had a sneaking suspicion that the latter really was a computer, a suspicion that was confirmed in the acknowledgement at the end of the book.
Marian’s internal dialogue and many of the scenes she found herself in surprised me and will stay with me for a while. As a artful AI book about AI’s role in art it has an unsettling, precarious footprint.
I felt the book was let down by a schmaltzy happy ending and a resigned pro-Big-Tech conclusion that seemed at odds with what the rest of the book had to say.