A timely meditation on what happens when artificial intelligence clashes with human stupidity.
An AI researcher, Ty, has discovered how to teach a machine to write. He joins a start-up, Opel, eager to bring on-demand literature to millions. As Opel makes overbold claims about how its writing machine will automate human connection, Ty is increasingly drawn to the fiery relationship with his activist partner, Zora. As each of them flees from their own past, Ty and Zora while away hours in their passionate debates about how to create a future for themselves and for the world. When Zora urges Ty to join her protest against big tech, Ty is forced to decide what he really values. Caught between worlds, Ty loses himself in the advice of his writing machine. How will Ty come to understand the difference between right and wrong, real and illusory?
With its satirical portrayal of the promises of Silicon Valley, its tragic vision of the dreams of young love, and its timely commentary on the impacts of AI, The Strength of the Illusion marks a stunning debut by Jared Moore. At the heart of this philosophical novel lie the questions: What kind of relationships do we want with machines? What kind of relationships do we want with other people?
“An exhilarating mash-up of high tech and high literature, The Strength of the Illusion probes our connections with the people around us and the machines that surround us.”
“Whether you fear, welcome, or dismiss the emerging powers of large language models, Jared Moore’s technically grounded, richly textured novel will leave you with an intimate appreciation for how this affliction has settled in among us and why we cannot escape.”
“Jared Moore is equally at ease penning keen observations of human relationships or exploring acute philosophical conundra. In this age of ChatGPT, his debut novel reads less like sci-fi satire and more as poignant, pointed commentary on homo sapiens, circa The Singularity. Read it!”
“This story of the successes, failures, and consequences of the creation of an AI from a start-up named ‘OPEL’ (The Organization for the Production of Electronic Literature), becomes the arena for a sustained, humorous critique of the illusion, namely, “the errors left by Descartes”, such as duality, dichotomy, mechanism, and reductionism. The author’s intelligent and thoughtful prose, cast in a post-modern narrative, merits reading and rereading to come to grips with the profundity of his insights.”
“In the age of ChatGPT, there is no doubt that this extraordinary book was written by an alienated and anguished human heart.”
“An abstruse but often thought-provoking tech tale.”
“In Jared Moore’s The Strength of the Illusion, the lines between human and artificial intelligence blur, leaving the reader to ponder the depths of human connection and the implications of our ever-evolving technological landscape. A masterful blend of humor, philosophy, and heart, this novel is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the complex relationship between humanity and our creations.”
“Pop quiz. Literature is made out of 1) inspirations 2) genius 3) words. If you answered 1) or 2), you’re voted off the island. You can find those words in the street, as Invisible Seattle did years ago, or you can find them on the web, as the AI program does in Jared Moore’s wonderfully hybrid treatise-novel, The Strength of the Illusion, which manages to be simultaneously a step-by-step guide as to how such a program might be trained to create a simulacrum of literature by utilizing the oldest form of composition, mimesis or imitation, and a chronicle of the gradual loss of reality by the protagonist Ty, who has designed the lit-creator program for a start-up called Opel, or Organization for the Production of Electronic Literature. Mixing a pitch-perfect rendering of technobabble with Nabokovian linguistic play, Moore (or some AI program imitating him) has produced an enjoyable literary unicorn that should delight the reader hungry for something new.”
“This was a strange novel—in the sense of strange particles or perhaps, more aptly, Hofstadter’s strange loop. On one reading, it is like a Jackson Pollock of exuberant literacy. Beneath the smorgasbord of brilliant ideas and broken sentences there is a narrative. It is a touching narrative that rests on a love triangle between Ty—a large language modeller—Zora—his seditious partner and a third party; perhaps Opel—his tech start-up—or perhaps Ty’s ontological security?
Another reading of this (philosophical) novel speaks to strange loops: at one point in the narrative, Ty works “on a proof of concept for a book length sequence of generated natural language—a novel.” One is suddenly confronted with a spine-tingling fantasy that “The Strength of the Illusion” is that novel. Am I, the reader, part of the “proof of concept”? Who wrote this book? Did the author artfully emulate the flighty ramblings of a large language model — or did he carefully curate and contextualise some synthetic content to create an illusion that keeps the reader glued to the pages?
Whether you read this as the strangest and novelist of novels, or pretend you are participating in a 21st-century Turing test, I can guarantee one thing—you will want to talk to somebody about it afterwards!”