"Check Out Narratology Maybe": Fictional Imaginaries of AI Narration

ABSTRACT: Stories with nonhuman narrators are common throughout literary history, but how does the imagination of computational nonhuman narrators in contemporary fiction prompt a rethinking of notions of narrative ethics, mediation, and (un)reliability? That is the central question that my article raises against the backdrop of current cultural understandings of artificial intelligence. Building on work in the social sciences and philosophy, I outline the main conceptual, emotional, and ethical tensions that traverse contemporary debates on AI. I argue that these tensions create a number of areas of uncertainty that are explored in a posthumanist vein by fiction including the works I focus on in the article, Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Aurora and Charles Yu's short story "Systems." My readings show that the computational abstraction of AI systems affords unique possibilities for the defamiliarization of anthropocentric assumptions. It results in new forms of unreliability and a more explicit foregrounding of the synthetic dimension of narrative than in animal or object narration. The fictional device of AI narration thus offers stimulating, and often unsettling, perspectives on the dilemmas emerging from the increasingly tangible reality of computational cognition.