June 2024 Short Story: "50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Should Know" by Ken Liu

[Natalie]

Our June 2024 short story is "50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Should Know" by Ken Liu. It can be found here: https://www.uncannymagazine.com/artic...

[Ryan]

The premise of this story is decent, but the dry, Wikipedia style employed here didn't work very well. It did work well in another Liu story (The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species, which I highly recommend, at https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fi...).

Here, I felt the story should have explored the wider societal implications of the AI.

[Sabri]

I wasn't sure what to make of this; it just felt like the author was pulling random events out of their head. But then, I got the same feeling from reading a book like Solaris.

BTW there is an interview with the author published in the same edition which goes into the process behind the writing: https://www.uncannymagazine.com/artic...

[Oleksandr]

I've finished both the story and the interview (thanks Sabri for the link!) and I find both the idea (AI AI critic) and the structure (from birth to death) very good. However, on this great skeleton the meat of the story, its style and details haven't truly worked for me.

I agree that it reminds of weirder works by Stanisław Lem, not so much Solaris as his reviews of imaginary books

[Natalie]

The story offers a brief history, followed by a list of advice. I do wonder how the WHEEP-3 was designed so that it was capable of generating advice (analyzing and dissecting AI in order to offer insight for AI).
The list is advice to AI to understand humans. I like those that tried to capture a feeling or abstract experience (such as the texture of a good story, a story you can cling to and the divide between faith and knowledge). I wonder how advanced these AI WHEEP-3 advises are!

[Natalie]

Thanks for sharing that story, "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species" Sabri. Liu creates alien species, whose names sound much like Native American tribes, who record or share information differently. It reads like a list but the creativity inherent in the story is interesting!