What separates humans from machines? This question has long been the premise for science fictional stories about how humans and machines might coexist (or not). This question feels ever more urgent as advancements in artificial intelligence have people growing more and more concerned about what their place in the world will be. For as long as I have been reading stories, I have been fascinated with these questions. Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt” was the first AI story I ever remember reading, and, spoiler alert, the computer consumes the children and kills the parents! At least, that’s the quick and dirty of it. Around the same time, I also became obsessed with the Disney Channel’s “Smart House” in which a house equipped with “personal assistance technology” (PAT) provides convenience to a widower and his kids, but soon the computerized house becomes sentient and home becomes more of a prison than a sanctuary. The lesson here, in short (as it is in so many stories about human/machine relationships), is that machines, while seductive with their promises of efficiency and convenience, are dangerous. I have greedily consumed many stories in which an ostensibly helpful machine ultimately destroys (or threatens to destroy) its human masters. It’s easy to anticipate the tropes. Greedy, lazy humans destroy nature via the creation of machines to dominate the natural world. Machines gain sentience and destroy their makers. Humans, in the face of destruction, finally see the beauty in nature. But of course, it is too late. Total annihilation follows.
Despite the sometimes predictable nature of AI stories, I can’t help but find myself perpetually drawn to them. Maybe it’s because at the root of the question, what separates humans from machines, is a set of bigger questions —what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be alive? These questions are the foundation of Nina Schuyler’s newest novel, Afterword (CLASH Books) and her response is far from predictable. Schuyler’s book surprised me in a way so many stories grappling with technology don’t. What sets Schuyler’s novel apart from other books in the genre was that it never distilled the relationship between humans and machines into a single moral suggestion. For Schuyler, there are no easy answers when it comes to morality or what it means to be human. In part, this might be because at its core, Afterword is a love story. Are there any lengths that are too far to go in the name of love?
Afterword centers around tech genius Virginia Samson as she communicates with her dead lover via AI she has developed. Even before this unconventional iteration of their relationship, their affair was on the scandalous side. Virginia was just a teenager when Haru became her math tutor and eventually her lover. Now, decades after their love affair came to a tragic end, Virginia is reunited with Haru through a language processing technology she’s spent a lifetime developing. The novel feels like a contemporary mix between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Marguerite Duras, The Lover —the overarching theme being ill-fated yearning.
I spoke with Nina Schuyler via Zoom about artificial intelligence, extending life through technology, and writing what computers can’t.
Shelby Hinte: I recently read your essay [How to Tell a True Origin Story of a Novel] where you essentially say that you don’t really believe in origin stories and I was like, oh, I can’t ask her how she got the idea for her book, but could you share a little bit about some of the things that were on your mind when you were writing Afterword?
Nina Schuyler: When I initially got interested in artificial intelligence and natural language processing it was, I think, 2017. I wasn’t looking to write anything about it. I was just curious because it seemed amazing and almost impossible to teach a computer to write a sentence that sounds human. I live in the Bay Area and there’s actually three people that live nearby me that are in this field of natural language processing, so I’d walk to pick up my kid from school and I’d end up talking about it with one of the parents. I got all this information and got thinking about it before these other things came up for me in the novel about privacy and gender and death.
Then the de Young museum had an amazing exhibit called “The Cult of the Machine” in 2018. There was an exhibit of work by Stephanie Dinkins where she was talking to a robot named Bina48. They had videos of her at the museum having a conversation with Bina48. Stephanie would ask like, how are you feeling today? And Bina48 would answer, I’m sad, I feel lonely. And it felt so human. So that got me inspired to keep learning and researching it until other kinds of forces and motivations culminated.
SH: In a way, Afterword, is sort of a modern-day Frankenstein. Virginia is trying to bring her lover back from the dead through technology. In a lot of ways, humans are always looking at all the ways technology can extend life, but Virginia takes it a step further. What are your thoughts on this idea of the human drive to not lose who we love in relation to where we’re at with technological advancements?
NS: I don’t think humans have ever been good at accepting limitations and technology has allowed us to transcend a lot of limitations. Even just in agriculture we’ve moved from little farms to mega farms and technology helped us do that, to produce a massive amount of food. I have a friend, he’s diabetic, and now inserted into him is a machine that regulates his sugar levels and beeps if it’s dropping too low. He said he would’ve died by now. It’s called Inter evolution — the intertwining of human and machine. So essentially he would have passed by now except for this new technology that will help him monitor his blood sugar in the diabetic world.
We’re bad at accepting limitations. So the question became, and it’s still an open question, if we eliminate death, do we eliminate what it means to be human? My first gut reaction is yes, because death makes everything so vital and precious. If you know you’re going to die, it makes you pay attention. Now I’m reading about the extension of life with nanotechnology, these little microscopic things that will eventually be inserted into the bloodstream to hunt for cancer cells and eliminate them. We’re moving in the direction of potential immortality. There’s a real drive for that. But is it a good thing that we eliminate mortality?
SH: In the book, technology straddles being both useful and dangerous. I think is hard to pull this off in stories that deal with technology. It’s often either look at this great gadget or look at how this will destroy us. How did you create that balance?
NS: I think I foreground the beating heart of the book as the big love affair and once we get into humanity, it’s complex and ambiguous. There are no easy answers. So technology was always secondary in a way. I never thought of it as science fiction. I just didn’t. And I had a professor who said, you know, literature needs to take back the genres. And what she meant by that is we need to insert character into mystery, thriller, science fiction, fantasy or whatever. Don’t forget the character. Foreground character.
SH: What does your writing practice look like?
NS: Well, I have two children. But he goes to school and it’s like a deadline. Like, okay, he’s going to be out of school at three. You better do something. When school’s out I want to take care of him and be with him. So there’s a deadline to apply myself. I’m happier when I create something. I put these constraints on, because I have children, but they’re good constraints. I’ve had students that are like, oh, I’m going to quit my job and just write all the time. Now most of those students never write, or they go, well, I had 10 hours and I just fiddled away. I went on a hike and then I met friends. There’s something about limitation that provides freedom. Freedom to create.
SH: I can really relate to having this amount of time that is all you get because there’s other people who depend on you — whether it’s showing up to work or getting dinner ready. I imagine sometimes it would be so nice to just wake up whenever I want, but that’s not my life. It’s never been my life. And I find it works. I still have a fantasy of getting to write five or six or eight hours a day every day though.
NS: Yeah, I’ve never had that. I just haven’t. Even before children I had a full-time job, so I’d get up before work early, and I’d ride my bike around. This is when I lived in the city. I’d ride at least a half hour and then go to work for eight hours or ten hours and then come home and be wiped out. Maybe I did five minutes [of writing], but I was exhausted. I’ve never gone on a writer’s retreat. They were too expensive. And what would I do with the children? My husband works too. I’ve come to understand that this is good. These are good constraints, good parameters. Because there’s pressure to get it done.
SH: It’s not just the demands of kids and a job, right? It’s like the maintenance of our bodies. It can be a lot to say, oh, I’m going to schedule in this 30 minutes of writing before I have to go and be a whole human. What do you think it is that keeps you fitting writing in despite how busy you might be?
NS: Because I just love it. I love writing. I don’t write fast. I love writing sentences that are musical. It’s so satisfying. I have a lot of work. It’s just in a drawer. I’ll never send it out. It’s just a practice. I tell my students that too — come back to the act of doing it. I really am careful to say “I write” versus “I am a writer” because I don’t want to identify as a writer because it can be rejected. If my identity is tied to being a writer, then it becomes too fragile. So, I write. No one can take that away. It’s a verb. It’s an action.
SH: I was reading your book around the same time that ChatGPT was all over the news. What are your thoughts on AI as a tool for written communication?
NS: There are great things about it if you see it as a tool and use it as a tool. There’s a lot that can help you do research. I just wrote a short story about a police detective, and I didn’t know what they did. So, I asked AI to give me 10 actions that a police detective would do. In the old days I’d be like trying to find someone at the police department that would talk to me or maybe Google it and try to find a website about training as a police detective. The downside right now is that all these large language models have been trained on massive amounts of data on the internet, which means intellectual property problems. There is this idea that AI could tag where text is coming from so that writers could be paid royalties every time their work was used. Then it wouldn’t feel like the creative class was being obliterated.
It seems like the copy editors will be replaced by this. Already you can run your writing through AI like Grammarly or Wordtune. There are a lot of apps now that are just doing copy editing work and translation. A lot of writers translate as well. So that could be eliminated. If it’s formulaic, AI can and will do it. And it’s doing it. You look on Amazon books and there are now books being written by AI. I don’t know why a writer would do this, but if it’s a formulaic kind of story it will be able to do it because it’s consumed this kind of work. But if it’s original work, you know, a real creative work, it won’t replace that.
SH: I find this idea about formulaic writing really interesting. Eugene Lim writes about this in his novel Search History. One of the concepts occurring in the book is this idea of the potential elimination of a novelist. The question it poses is, can fiction be written by computers? An argument in the book is that computer might be able to write genre fiction, but work that doesn’t follow a formula or that deviates from the norm, AI probably couldn’t do that.
Sometimes it does feel like literary work that isn’t formulaic can struggle to gain readership and even publication. What are your thoughts on how AI might change readers’ relationship to writing and consuming art?
NS: When I do a talk about AI or natural language processing, there’s a lot of fear in the room. In this culture —the Western culture— technology is falling under the mythology of the terminator that we are going to be extinguished by. Now, I’m differentiating that [western culture], because in Japan, it’s very different. They embrace a rheumatic robotic lifestyle. They have a different relationship with robots and technology in part because of their reconstruction after World War II. Technology was really important. And then there is Shintoism, which sees animism of everything. Rocks have spirits, trees have spirits, so why not a robot?
I am really happy that my book came out now because AI is putting pressure on defining the difference between AI and humanity. Technology emphasizes efficiency and productivity. Now there is this technology that sounds human and is only going to get better, so what is it to be human? I think that’s going to become really important for those who appreciate art and want to support it.
I teach a style and writing class and I teach all the ways you can write a sentence. Grammarly and the other apps don’t like what I’m teaching because they want to standardize everything. I’m teaching how to unstandardized it.
SH: In the book, Virginia is an expat with her family in Japan and a big part of the drama around Haru’s technology is the speculation that he’s selling information to the Chinese government. What was your motivation to write about technology on a more global scale as opposed to focusing on the US government?
NS: Virginia and Haru’s relationship really depended on privacy. So it was like a core value for them because he agrees to teach her math and no one else would. At that time, in the sixties, most of the women who wanted to pursue advanced math were denied because they took a spot from a promising man that would go on and succeed in the field. That relationship occurs in Japan and that’s the birth of it. Japan has such interesting relationship with China —that’s a nice way of putting it— and I wanted to deepen the characters, so it got me curious about Haru’s background. Then it got me reading into the area of World War II and how the Japanese invaded China. I wanted a background or history to better explain what Haru might be doing with this Chinese information.
SH: And one of the things that kind of undoes all of Virginia’s work is her transgression towards Haru and not allowing her partner his own privacy and the right to his secret experiences and emotions. As a writer and a person, when we’re living in this world where we’re having conversations about digital privacy, I also wonder what privacy do we allow or take away from ourselves and from our loved ones through our writing? What’s your own metric?
NS: I think it’s critical for a writer to seek out a private space, kind of a room of one’s own that functions as freedom and a place to expand and explore and transgress all that you were taught. I always hear from non-fiction writers ‘I can’t write about that. It’ll offend someone.’ It’s like, okay, first of all, we got to get rid of that voice so that we can create privately. I had one interviewer say, ‘you know, you don’t have much on the internet about yourself.’ It’s like, that’s on purpose. I need to keep the interior inside. That’s where everything starts —experiencing it and reflecting on it. Why is this staying with me? Why do I keep thinking about this or this image or this word that someone said?
All of that is, for lack of a better word, the creative process. I think it’s essential for writers to have that private room of one’s own inside and to let yourself create and get rid of what you’ve been told to write or how to write. I came across a Russian word, vnye, and it means being within a context while remaining oblivious to it. It’s really interesting to me. It’s simultaneously part of a system, but not following the parameters of the system. So yes, I live in this Western culture in California, and yet I need to withdraw from it. I belong to a books in translation club, so I read work from around the world to also try to disappear from this culture and experience other structures and ways of writing.
SH: When do you know you’ve worked through like the private muck of the self and are ready for a story to be shared?
NS: It is just going into that private room and starting something, then entering it again and again, and then stepping out, printing it out, and reading it. Then going in a little more aware that I want an audience for it. A conscious mind comes in, so I’m less in the muck of it and I’ve got out in the bigger circle of it, and I am aware of a reader. That essay was hard to write. I don’t usually share non-fiction. I’m a fiction writer. But I wanted to remind people how messy creativity can be. So that’s why I did it. For the most part I don’t feel like I’m cannibalizing myself. I write fiction. I make it up. I want the privacy of that fiction sphere to make things up.
Nina Schuyler’s novel, Afterword, was published in May 2023 by Clash Books and was named a top book by Alta Journal and Bay City News. Her short story collection, In This Ravishing World, won the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections and The Prism Prize for Climate Literature and will be published by Regal House Publishing in July 2024. Her novel, The Translator, was a finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and the winner of the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction. Her novel, The Painting, was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her nonfiction book, How to Write Stunning Sentences, is a bestseller. Her short stories have been published by Zyzzyva, Fugue, Your Impossible Voice, Santa Clara Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. She has a new nonfiction book, Stunning Sentences: Creative Writing Journal. She teaches creative writing for Stanford Continuing Studies, The Writing Salon, and the University of San Francisco. She lives in California.