Over the holiday, I was reflecting on my writing practice and the fact that my main interest is in speculative fiction for the young adult (YA) audience. This made me wonder why I defaulted to an adult narrator and themes for the creative portion of my Futures Project, and prompted me to begin envisioning an alternate, YA version of my project to see if it might be an interesting direction.
The story outline that I’ve developed so far lends itself well to YA themes: The interaction between the scholar, the AI, and the in-universe story reflects on questions of identity and the boundaries of self, which are particularly pertinent in a coming-of-age context. It would be fascinating to consider how (and if) coming-of-age changes in a future in which humans hold different assumptions about technology and different relationships with both technology and their environment.
If I made the shift to YA, the main character would need to be a young person (or, later in the story, a person caught in perpetual youth by way of medical technology). The question then becomes what it means to grow up alongside AI, or alongside a specific AI — a timely exploration, and a very different question than what it means to incorporate AI into an already well-solidified adult identity (as would be the case with an adult main character).
Human coming-of-age might also provide a metaphor for the “young” stage of AI and its development. In a way, it feels as if society (or, at least, western society, which I’m more familiar with) has latched onto AI in much the same way that a kid can get temporarily obsessed with a new toy, game, or piece of media: extolling its virtues, struggling with whether/how to share, spending time and money on it at the expense of other necessary pursuits, getting so wrapped up in its allure that it feels like the end-all be-all, like a fundamental part of identity. Of course, the harms associated with this approach to AI are much more significant, but it could be interesting to draw that parallel and then explore what happens after and what “growing up” looks like.
This analogy lends itself to the inverse of the question of what AI means for human coming-of-age: What does it mean for a technology to grow up within certain human institutions, frameworks, or power structures? This would allow me to look at another area that I’ve been interested in recently, namely, more-than-human/nonhuman intelligence and ways of being and, in general, relationships between the human and more-than-human worlds. The readings and lectures from the World as Story and Ethical Data Futures have emphasized that we need to change these relationships for the sake of creating sustainable and just societies, and these courses have clarified that it’s important to me to use my Futures Project to envision such shifts. I will write more about this in my next blog post.
Thinking about the broader social/technological context, reworking the piece for YA feels potentially generative given the stark generational divide in how people understand, perceive, and utilize AI (I’d like to find data on this premise, but anecdotally, it seems to be borne out). Of particular note, there seems to be a gap in the uptake of AI among young people vs. the institutions that surround them (e.g., many students use AI, but schools/universities are often cautious about or downright opposed to it) — and this opens many questions relating to personal agency, ethics, safety, consent, etc. Based on my observations of real life, it may make sense for my young protagonist to initially embrace AI as an exciting tool; if the AI is trained on all of the protagonist’s data, or otherwise integrated with the protagonist’s identity, they might view it as an extension of the self. Over the course of the story, their understanding would grow more nuanced; perhaps AI can indeed be a part of the self, but because the self is more than data, it cannot fully be encapsulated by any process that treats it as the sum of its data — and, indeed, not all of one’s data must be shared in order to have a relationship with AI. Or, conversely, perhaps a data-driven approach can actually reveal other facets of the self, and the relationship with AI can drive new self-understandings.
Overall, these ideas and questions make me wonder what it means to write interactive digital fiction for YA specifically, as opposed to adult. Or, put another way, how can we imagine new modes of literature for young readers that are responsive to and engage with the new technologies we’re experiencing and envisioning? I will need to think more about this before deciding whether to pursue this route, but it’s an interesting possibility that has challenged and advanced my thinking on the project.
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