This hopefully will not be the last novel about LLMs: a review of Your Behavior Will Be Monitored
In Your Behavior Will Be Monitored, you get fed a bunch of documents related to a single fictional company that develops AI. It's a narrative told through (unethically obtained) data, which should raise provocative questions about surveillance and sentience, though it contributes nothing new to a conversation that literally everyone on the planet is already having. It kind of just reads like a collage of all the biggest headlines about AI. I respect an author for keeping things simple, but I think anyone who's heard of ChatGPT can handle something a little less basic than what Justin Feinstein has given us. One of the characters is supposed know next to nothing about engineering and technology, which is fair, but quite frankly, the questions he asks makes it seem like he spent a decade living under a rock. For someone existing in a world in which AI has become so ubiquitous, how has he not asked any of these questions before? You don't have to be an engineer to have heard of LLMs before.
It remains to be seen whether a book like this one is going to age well. (If you subscribe to Corey Doctorow's approach, then this book's focus on improving targeted ads may not really be an accurate portrayal of what Silicon Valley is incentived to be interested it. Then again, who knows if Doctorow is correct? Who knows if his theories even fully apply to companies solely dedicated to AI?) It's always a risk to write a book about a topic you don't have enough distance from. It's even more of a risk for it to contain only dry epistolary content, meaning if the message doesn't age well, then there isn't even much of a story underneath that has potential to continue resonating with readers.
The story is fun, I suppose, but it's not brilliant or memorable, and it's also a bit repetitive at the beginning. The pace does pick up at the end, though I do have mixed feelings about how smooth and convenient the conclusion is. I don't want to discourage people from trying out this book if it interests them, but honestly, if you want to read an epistolary novel about the ill-advised creation and development artificial intelligence Frankenstein is right there. It pretty much says almost everything that needs to be said, and we already know that it's aged well.