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Tech leaders say that they have never witnessed changes so rapid as the ones artificial intelligence is causing now. Writers, constrained by publishing cycles, can only move so fast. But we are beginning to see serious responses. Over the past three months, Elif Batuman has published a long essay about using ChatGPT to locate a Proust quote — a frustrating experience, like the tech — and Sheila Heti has collaborated with AI to produce a richly strange, jolting short story that begins with an artificial intelligence called Mommy.
The virtual being at the centre of Julianne Pachico’s latest novel — one of the first full-length attempts to reckon with AI’s recent prominence — also happens to be a maternal figure. But the relationship is more ambiguous and fraught. In Jungle House, a young woman called Lena lives in the rainforest as the caretaker of a high-tech holiday home, whose sophisticated control system she calls “Mother”. Equipped with cameras, heard over speakers, and acting through a domestic staff of “droids”, Mother is sort of a souped-up Alexa, albeit one with the capacity to worry about her own obsolescence and shoot bullets at intruders.
The South American setting of the novel is never named, but might be a futuristic version of Colombia, where the British-American author has spent much of her life, and where she has set two previous books. The people who own Jungle House, the Morel family — rich, fair-haired, with European heritage and plantation-owning history — visit only intermittently. There is mention of “rebels” and “upcoming elections”. Climate and biodiversity collapse has already happened; jaguars haven’t been seen “for generations”. But natural resources are still being exploited aggressively. Meanwhile, the machines have their own grand plan.
Mother is a formidable presence: matronly, clipped, forever feeling slighted and insisting “she is not totally useless yet”. But she is also ruthlessly protective. We learn that she essentially took Lena in as a baby, raising her with the assistance of robotic helpers. She has managed to conceal this from her human masters, maintaining that Lena is a local indigenous girl, hired to “enhance” the family’s “jungle experience”. The guarding of this secret will be the engine of the book’s plot.
Artificial intelligence has often been used by novelists as a trope to explore inequalities between human beings, with Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) being recent examples. This feeds into a much older tradition of stories, from the Pygmalion myth to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where misguided humans create independent beings that they then struggle to control. The last, published in 1818 with purposeful echoes of colonialism and the enslaved, is a pertinent analogue for Jungle House, which operates in a similar nexus of technological advancement and social injustice.
The 38-year-old author has repeatedly examined the subtle intricacies of class, whether in New Yorker short stories about South American trust fund kids in Brooklyn, or her 2021 novel The Anthill, in which a Colombian expat returns home and volunteers for strange social initiatives in Medellin. Although she’s human, Lena is a kind of automaton, like the various “droids” that serve the Morels. She’s comfortable describing them with gendered pronouns and reading their distinct personalities, and Pachico savours the humour of these moments: “treacherous” satellites with their “countless dramas”; “bossy”, “paranoid” ex-military drones. “Mother and the helicopter always got along surprisingly well,” we are told. One satellite has “converted to Catholicism”.
Indeed, the robots turn out to be more compelling, sympathetic and complex than the wider human cast. The upper-crust Morel family are essentially flat, satirical creations: greedy, unthinking capitalists who get cigar ash all over freshly cleaned surfaces, come out with repugnant views, and treat Lena badly.
Because of this, though, I often found myself wishing that Mother and Lena would be left to develop their dynamic in more isolation: away from other people and the novel’s contextual scaffolding. If the central human-AI relationship is dramatic in all the right places, it is precisely because it is depicted in such a human way. At one point, Mother rebukes Lena for drawing her with a human face: this wouldn’t be “accurate”, Mother says. In a sense, though, this is exactly what Pachico herself does, giving each AI presence vestiges of recognisable humanity.
The generative AI boom presumably came after the author had conceived of and written much of her book. Though fortuitous from a marketing perspective, it does have the effect of making the human-inflected literary conception of AI feel rather behind the times: one of the most fascinating things about AI now, as people have been learning from ChatGPT, is its capacity to be unfamiliar and weird.
Yes, one would expect the tech to become less strange as it is refined. But fiction writers have taught us that a truly sophisticated intelligence, though created by us, might not elect to follow the destiny we happen to have written for it. The challenge for the many novelists bound to write about AI now will be comprehending this strangeness — and the many, many things that we haven’t yet imagined.
Jungle House by Julianne Pachico, Serpent’s Tail £14.99, 208 pages
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