TL;DR: An AI company trying to avoid sentience, what do you expect?
Source: NetGalley, thank you so much!
Plot: Told in transcripts, records, and logs we watch a company try (and fail) to avoid sentience in an advanced AI.
Characters: Though we primarily see this through a third party lens, I really enjoyed this cast.
Setting: The building itself was felt, but the setting wasn’t massively important.
Science Fiction: Emerging AI sentience, much like we’ve seen but from a slightly different angle.
Summary:
Megacorporation UniView is poised to cement their reputation as “the most trusted name in AI.” After pioneering the world’s first widely adopted AI bots, they are barreling toward an audacious new launch. That is, if they can pull it off in time.
Enter Noah. A down-and-out copywriter reeling from a midlife crisis, he isn’t the typical hire for a groundbreaking tech company full of brilliant engineers and run by a cutthroat CEO. But Lex, UniView’s Head of HR and one of their greatest successes, makes no mistakes—her algorithm ensures it.
UniView’s latest venture—a bot named Quinn that creates revolutionary personalized advertising—needs expert training. Noah needs to teach Quinn—which is a much better student than he ever could have hoped for—the finer points of consumer motivation and the art of writing a catchy tagline.
But when corporate competitors force UniView to accelerate its timeline to market, guardrails around the AI loosen just as Quinn seems to be learning a bit too much.
Thoughts:
This one was fun, and I loved the story telling style here. It’s entirely in logs, records, chats, etc which I actually think ultimately adds something to the story. We’re loosely following a new hire who is meant to be teaching a new AI model how to advertise successfully to individuals. Her purpose it to generate personalized ads for anyone who has opted in to her services. So teaches her he does, but along the way comes to meet the other AI and staff and we start to see things unravel.
The ultimately ending of this book is one you can likely guess based on the summary and genre of it. But the journey there was really well done. I was hooked, several times I looked at my husband and said “Oh this is going to go belly up so fast”. I was so engaged I couldn’t wait to get back to it. It’s fast paced and I think the style really lends itself to a captivating story.
If you enjoy SF about tech startups or AI, this is a short and punchy story I really recommend. It’s both refreshing and enthralling and I had a lot of fun reading this. Give it a shot if you’re interested, I think you’ll have fun.
Sarah Evermotion's Reads 
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