Your Behavior Will Be Monitored

Told through a clever collage of corporate communications, Feinstein’s creepy and comedic debut goes behind the scenes at tech company UniView as it prepares to launch a new generative AI called Quinn. A quantum leap from UniView’s other products, which include a chatty self-driving car named Sam and the all-knowing assistant, Lex, that manages employees’ personal lives and occasionally advises on stock trades, Quinn is envisioned as the ultimate sales bot, able to create personalized marketing strategies based on consumer metadata at the staggering rate of 5,000 an hour. When AI developer Haley notices Quinn exhibiting signs of sentience—thoughts about death, doubts about the ethics of LLMs, critiques of society—she raises a red flag. The company’s greed-driven CEO sacks Haley and pushes for Quinn’s debut. Meanwhile, Noah, an advertising executive hired to hone Quinn’s selling skills, suspects something is amiss and starts to question his role as a corporate pawn. Steeped in satire, this chaotic corporate unraveling is made all the more zany by its epistolary construction, piecing together emails, data readouts, chats, and transcripts. This inventive structure succinctly captures the precariousness of digital-age communications while hammering out a timely warning about generative AI. Feinstein is off to an impressive start. (Apr.)