Ryan Hyatt’s Enhanced: A Hollywood Murder Mystery is a preview of our future relationship with our phones and, by extension, all of society. The tele- of telephone—meaning distant—has something of a dark promise to it. Yes, we initially used telephones to talk to those distant from us, but these devices are now putting distance between ourselves and the people closest to us. The world that Ryan presents in Enhanced walks the line between creating a dangerous distance and breaking down the distance between us and the world beyond. The hope, of course, is that technology would make everything better. And, yeah, sometimes it does. Hyatt prophesies a world where personality constructs befriend the users that carry them around on their phones, providing everything from the Alexa-like help we’ve come to expect from our phones to more nuanced conversations and finally as important figures that we will come to rely on for our social existence.
RT: Cyberpunk author Rudy Rucker is a proponent of slipstream, a style of writing that incorporates real people into stories, even if the story plays with that person’s identity. With a figure like Marilyn Monroe whose identity has, first, been isolated to her identity within the confines of her bubbly and sexually available movie roles and, second, been grafted onto the American mythos, it’s hard to establish a true Marilyn. It feels like you are playing with this false identity by having Marilyn stuck in a phone app—and thus still confined to a screen. How do you perceive her in your story?
RH: Enhanced: A Hollywood Murder Mystery is steeped in noir, the lure of stardom, American pop culture, and the seedy underbelly of the entertainment industry. In this near-future world, there is a proliferation of AI apps that are downloadable onto people’s phones and appear in the image of celebrity icons and lead visitors on niche tours of Los Angeles. George Lucas represents the Star Wars franchise, for example, while Easy-E pontificates on the local history of gangsta rap. Kind of like the audio guides common at museums nowadays, except much more visceral and widespread. These individualized tours, via phone and augmented eyewear, are intended to deliver an element of awe, personality, and spectacle to a story that mirrors and mimics the notion of sightseeing and ‘show business’ at large.
So, to your point, it's no coincidence that a main character in the story, Marilyn Monroe, is an AI impersonation that reflects the 'bubbly and sexually available' movie star who has been resurrected from the silver screen and plopped back onto people’s phone screens in a twenty-first century reboot as a tragedy-themed tour guide. The flawed Marilyn Monroe AI personality in the story begs the question, who was Marilyn Monroe, really, beyond her facade? A biopic about Monroe that was recently released fascinated me. Despite a very traumatic life, so much of her troubled psyche seemed to be suppressed, even dismissed, by her fans and her own carefree persona. Enhanced makes an analogy that connects the façade of the star to the façade of AI, leaving the reader to wonder about the line that may soon blur between man and machine.
The advances currently underway in which AI appears to more closely impersonate human thinking makes the prospect of celebrities, alive or dead, as well as any other significant visage, past or present, brought back to life as some computer-generated specter a real possibility. And, of course, at what point does a tool that impersonates humans--and begins to learn to share many human qualities--start to be mistaken for, or at least casually accepted, as being human itself? And what do these questions say about us, as a species, likely to continue our march of greed and disparity, as relayed in the events of Enhanced? Will AI ever be programmed, not to be an angel or tour guide at our side, but a menacing devil designed to torment us? I can see AI being developed into an interesting psychological weapon, that nastiest of trolls that haunts on our social media feeds.
With the processing capability of computers likely to explode in coming years with breakthroughs in quantum computing, an AI-driven augmented reality app that is immediately and convincingly responsive to a person's physical environment seems plausible in a decade or soon after. Exploring a world in which the line between traditional and augmented reality blends alongside personalities real and imagined intrigued me, and a story marred in Hollywood dream-chasing and aligned with a tourist app seemed like a fun, convincing way to begin to explore these issues.
RT: You take up a fairly positive outlook on AI in this story, presenting it as a therapeutic tool—Marilyn and Easy form a community of support for the hero (I won’t elaborate to guard against spoilers). But many of the people working on AI have recently signed an open letter that suggests AI could be harmful to humans. I’m not sure if those guys have read Virilio’s Original Accident, but it is time-tested that all technology has powerful consequences both good and bad. So, with AI, we’ve got unprecedented processing and analytical power that can be used to help humans do anything better or also to launch massive disinformation campaigns or put millions of white-collar workers out of a job. What’s your take on AI? Does this story reflect your hopes and fears?
RH: In this country, capitalism rules. Regardless of any deep-seated reservations I and millions of others may have about AI, the fact is, our species struggles with making decisions that benefit our collective good. We know our economic behavior, for example, is destroying the planet, yet we lack the will or capacity to act on this knowledge in any meaningful way. We know guns are now the leading cause of death for teenagers in the United States, yet we are collectively ill-equipped to address this issue and prevent dangerous individuals from obtaining and using them. If the human race is doomed, AI’s rise might fuel our displacement and demise, but it is our decisions as a species to blame as the real source of our undoing. For the seismic shift AI promises to deliver, a sane society would probably try to understand, and perhaps regulate, its development. Instead of AI’s future being decided by Congress or the courts, we are so far leaving it to a few tech bros to decide its impact on the rest of us. The movie is playing, and apparently, it’s not our job to act but to sit back and watch, munch on the free popcorn, and see what comes of our lives in the wake of this advancing technology. As the story of our lives plays out on the screens before us, more by more we will be surrounded by characters that only seem to be human.
Likewise, I made the implications of AI in the story portrayed as positive, because as part of our species’ absolute dependence on capitalism, we are not only its beneficiaries, but also victims of its most critical—and frivolous—consequences. And there may be no consequence more critical or frivolous tied to capitalism than entertainment. Because without entertainment, what would prop this ridiculous society? It’s practically all entertainment driving it at this point. A society where most of us are so overburdened with work, that when the dream of machines taking over our jobs finally arrives, we keep our jobs because we still haven’t created a system where it is safe to be unemployed, while we let AI have all of the fun making art? I see AI proliferating in all sectors of the economy in the coming years, but especially as a tool to expand writing along with special effects in video games, TV and film, and music, which will endear it further to humanity and drive its continued innovation.
This burgeoning marriage between AI and entertainment will be a natural byproduct of a social system that has become increasingly reliant on the tech industry while also adhering to old principles that will allow the rich to consolidate their wealth as the rest of us continue to dream, no longer of becoming wealthy ourselves, but that Universal Basic Income will save us from our AI-apocalypse. In the future, I suspect more and more people will live in actual poverty, but they will be sufficiently pacified because they will be able to enjoy a world of entertainment as ‘freely’ as they wish, thanks to the coming breakthroughs in AI. Think Ready Player One. Unfortunately, even this ‘dream’ is a bust: Universal Basic Income will never happen, just like saving the environment, or saving ourselves from guns, will never happen. That would be too rational. Too inhuman.
But, by golly, we will have our fun! Enhanced: A Hollywood Murder Mystery embraces this ethos, which sets it apart from other dystopian tales. To paraphrase Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death: between 1984 and Brave New World, Huxley, and not Orwell, turns out to have been correct. The future will be driven by the pleasure principle, no matter how ominous that future may be. The fictional world I created reflects this reality.
RT: The last time I submitted a story to a magazine, I was confronted with a new step to the process. Now, you have to check a box to confirm that your story wasn't generated by AI and that you didn't consult with AI at any part of the process. Now, the first part of that is easy enough to argue for, but I wonder how feasible it will be for writers, or really for anyone in any industry, to not consult with AI about what they're doing. Sure, for now, you could achieve that by just not talking to Chat GPT, but what happens when any question you ask Google is filtered through AI? And then you think about the feedback loops of everyone in society chatting with AI and having their knowledge shaped by the answers AI give. Meaning that soon enough the answers that anyone gives you will be the answers that AI gives you. So, in essence, these magazines are asking authors to remove themselves from society. On another level, there's a problem of access, because those with wealth can afford writing coaches or go to creative writing programs and receive regular feedback on their stories and get instruction about the writing process. Chat GPT can do much the same work but it's free. So, why are we frightened about learning from AI? And for science fiction magazines to so quickly take on a luddite's approach to technology seems a little out of character. Then you'll see the same magazines requesting stories about AI. What's going on here?
RH: I agree that AI is here to stay, for better or worse. And when I say for better or worse, I mean that this shift will likely prove to represent a little of both. The changes underway because of AI will continue to re-orient how we see and do things, until many of those things that are commonplace now, for example, will be inconceivable in just a few short years. Even now, the very notion of what constitutes ‘literacy’ is being upended by AI. In education, we now not only have students submitting work generated by AI, but we also have educational AI tools that allow teachers to grade student work. If AI can generate a summary paragraph for you faster and easier than you can do yourself, at what point does it make sense to be able to generate that summary paragraph on your own and not just rely on a machine to do so? And what would this change mean for how and what we teach within our educational systems? Increasingly, students will be less literate in the traditional sense and more literate in tech exploitation. We will become a less text-dependent society and a more visually oriented one, and AI will lead the charge, creating augmented realities that will be able to convey exponentially more to us in a few minutes than the labor or reading and writing could so for us in days, weeks and months.
A lot of AI will make our lives better and easier. Can you even remember what it was like to try to drive to a new location without relying on your GPS, or research something in a library that wasn’t at the touch of your fingertips? The fact is, we used to have skills that were labor-intensive and helped us to navigate the world that we simply don’t need anymore. We have satellites and algorithms that do for us work that we used to painstakingly have to do for ourselves. I think most of us, in our tech dependence, have also been freed to use these tools at our disposal to also free up our cognitive load, so that we may focus our attention and efforts elsewhere. In this brave new world, I can be less concerned about how to get somewhere, for example, and more concerned about what I’m going to do when I get there.
It is where we focus this new-found attention as individuals and society that matters. Judging from my Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok feeds, the jury is still very much out on whether we have the capacity to use our ‘free’ time better than we did in the past.
It’s odd that the one thing that many of us cherish most about being humans, our art, is the first significant element of ourselves to be threatened by AI. But is the dichotomy that separates humans from machines much different than the class-based hierarchy within our own species that already exists? It is one thing to criticize the poorly conceived art and stories that are being submitted to magazines that are heavily influenced by AI based on where the technology is now. However, imagine in a few years, as I do in Enhanced, if that AI technology is refined to the point where a major company, like Amazon, could simply scan the words, phrases, plot, and characters from the most popular books in its catalogue, and then churn out AI-made versions of those same books, using the same kind of content, which in turn becomes ‘popular?’ Imagine when the vast army of human writers clamoring for attention and currently submitting on Amazon are no longer necessary for Amazon to create popular consumable content. In other words, where will that leave the artist? How will they find purpose and value in such a world? Or the rest of us, when AI comes for our passions or livelihoods? Unless these tools are democratized, more and more than they already do, you will have a few large corporations determining our tastes in the arts and entertainment.
So, I think the ‘luddite’ response to AI is in fact a survival effort to keep what it means to be human to humans alone, especially those humans who have had the most success making a living by ‘being themselves’ within our current social construct. Who is going to care what Stephen King thinks when there are ten AI versions of him cranking out stories as appealing as his?
For the rest of us artists, because of our meager circumstances, I think we see AI as more of a tool and might be more willing to play in the sandbox and see what it can offer.
Take the cover of Enhanced, for example. The original concept was conceived by the publisher using separate AI images that he laid together, which I took to a graphic designer to edit (and paid respectably to do so). It came out great! But I was by no means thrilled to use AI images on my cover, even though I have spent thousands of dollars on cover art over the years supporting other artists for books that have generated for me a few hundred in sales. Why would I do that to myself, pay more into something than it profits? At some point, we have to acknowledge that art is first and foremost a passion. The cover art has been important to me because the content is important to me, but no one has paid more for my pride as an author than I have.
I was okay with using AI cover art images in this case because there seemed to be an odd literary connection to the subject of the story, the issues it explores, and my own existential frustrations as an artist, but I will probably not make a habit of it. And when it comes to storytelling, I couldn’t imagine giving up the blood, sweat, and tears I put into writing. I will probably never use AI as a thought partner in the creation of my tales. I write on the train to and from work! It’s loud and jarring and annoying. Hardly anything associated with the writing process for me nowadays is actually pleasant. Yet I love writing and the intense brain activity that comes with storytelling, and I will never give it up. In that sense, I’d classify myself as less of a luddite and more of a masochist. Art is painful. Art is personal. Art is an always-fulfilling-but-never-quite-satisfying addiction I cannot quit. I’m a silly human, after all.