Helen Phillips on Writing Speculative Fiction in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

May Webb sees her first hum standing at a bus stop, and mistakes it for a sculpture. One year later, in the anxious “now” of Helen Phillips’ new novel Hum, AI-based robots called “hums” have taken over many jobs, or rendered them obsolete (May’s job working on AI communications has been erased). In fact, as the novel opens, a hum is performing facial recognition obscuring surgery on May’s face. May is being paid well to be a guinea pig in this test, a choice she may come to regret. Reading Hum is like shifting your perspective a couple of years into a dystopian future. Everything could turn out this way. In fact, it seems likely this is where we might be headed, based on the current state of climate change, artificial intelligence, surveillance, and government control.

Read it as a warning, and double down on that danger when you consider the dire implications for a responsible mother trying to grab a few moments of private time with her husband while giving her children a taste of the quickly dwindling natural world in a pricey Disneyland-esque botanic garden. Phillips’ short stories and earlier novels have been compared to the work of Calvino, Kafka, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, and Lorrie Moore. But she’s truly an original. Hum is speculative fiction at its best. (No AI was involved in our email conversation, which spanned the continent.)

*

Jane Ciabattari: How have these recent years of pandemic and conflict affected your life, your work, the writing of and launch of your new novel, Hum?

Helen Phillips: It’s impossible to separate the writing of Hum from the pandemic. I was about fifty pages into the book, and starting to find momentum with it, in March of 2020. I had to stop working on it for those first three overwhelming months as I moved my own Brooklyn College classes online while also overseeing my children’s online schooling. I tried (and sometimes failed) to stay connected to the book by snagging just a few minutes at the end of each day to read books related to its themes—Clifford A. Pickover’s Artificial Intelligence: An Illustrated History, Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. A little light reading. When eventually I did find some time to begin writing again, the premise of Hum hadn’t changed, but the emotional and psychological reality of the book was intensified by the pandemic, the 2020 election, and the wildfires in Colorado (where I was born and raised).

JC: When did you begin this new novel, and what was your intention at the beginning? How did you come up with the title?

HP: I began working on the book in earnest in the fall of 2019. At that time, I had about a hundred pages of very loose notes, as well as a long list of books and articles I wanted to read. As my reading and thinking evolved, I slowly shaped those notes into a structure and a plot. As soon as I realized the robots in the book would be called hums, I knew the title had to be Hum. I was lucky that the title come to me relatively early in the process (sometimes the title is the last thing to fall into place).

JC: “The first time she had seen a hum, standing at a bus stop on a sunny day last year,” you write, May Webb, your narrator, “had mistaken it for a sculpture, clean silver lines of arms and legs and neck linking oblong head and torso and feet, small spheres at elbow and wrist and knee and ankle joints, polished plastic and brushed aluminum, a gleaming thing.” Soon she sees hums dispensing meds at the pharmacy, taking blood pressure, patrolling streets with human police officers, in high demand by government institutions and private corporations. What inspired the concept of the hum?

HP: On the one hand, “hum” can refer to all the noises emitted by the machines that surround us, the low constant hum of activity, a potentially anxiety-producing buzz that might cause us to long for silence. On the other hand, “hum” is a beautiful-sounding word that can call to mind a parent humming a lullaby to a child. And, it’s a form of the sacred sound om. This duality in the word “hum” is important to the book, and to the characterization of the hums. They are elegant, sculptural beings. They are instruments of capitalism, of advertising, of surveillance. They have help and wisdom to offer (if one pays to turn off their advertising impulse). They exist in a gray area.

JC: As we meet May, she is undergoing surgery by a hum to obliterate her facial recognition identity. By altering the sixty-eight coordinates of her faceprint, she’ll be untrackable, “close to invisible, as far as the system is concerned.” All this in exchange for ten months’ salary. How did you develop this concept, and what research was involved?

HP: I’ve always found the concept of facial recognition surveillance very creepy, because you can’t opt out of having a face. That’s why adversarial tech, which interferes with the ability of surveillance technology to recognize a face, is fascinating to me. In my research, two articles struck me: firstly, “Adversarial Man” by John Seabrook in the New Yorker (March 19, 2020). I include a quote from that article in the endnotes to Hum: “(Adam) Harvey explained that he had moved on from face camouflage because, theoretically, any makeup design that can be used to foil a detection system could be incorporated into the system’s training data… This is the paradox of the adversarial man: any attempt to evade the system may only make it stronger, because the machine just keeps learning. And, with deep learning, it keeps learning faster.” So adversarial tech has its limits—and its irony.

The second article was by Kashmir Hill in the New York Times: “Your Face Is Not Your Own: When a Secretive Start-up Scraped the Internet to Build a Facial-Recognition Tool, It Tested a Legal and Ethical Limit—and Blew the Future of Privacy in America Wide Open” (March 18, 2021). May serves as a guinea pig in this facial surgery experiment in order to make money for her family after losing her job to AI—but she is also intrigued by the idea of being untrackable in a city where that has become essentially impossible. This is complicated, though, by the fact that later in the book she is desperate for facial recognition surveillance to help her (avoiding further spoilers here).

And this double-edged sword of facial recognition technology is apparent in our world, too; Kashmir Hill also wrote an article, “Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm” (New York Times, June 24, 2020), about a Michigan man who was wrongfully arrested based on a faulty facial recognition match. As Hill writes, “Recent studies… have found that while the technology works relatively well on white men, the results are less accurate for other demographics, in part because of a lack of diversity in the images used to develop the underlying databases.”

JC: Ironically May needs the income from this surgery because she has lost her job to hums, after working for years to “help refine and deepen the communicative abilities of artificial intelligence.” Are you predicting what might be just around the corner?

HP: I do worry about the ways in which our own labor can potentially make us obsolete. To tie this back to our reality, last year Alex Reisner of The Atlantic broke a story about 180,000+ books (including four of mine) being used without authors’ permission to train generative AI. To quote directly from the website of the Authors Guild in regards to their class-action suit against OpenAI:

“New York, N.Y., September 20, 2023—The Authors Guild and 17 authors filed a class-action suit against OpenAI in the Southern District of New York for copyright infringement of their works of fiction on behalf of a class of fiction writers whose works have been used to train GPT. The named plaintiffs include David Baldacci, Mary Bly, Michael Connelly, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, Elin Hilderbrand, Christina Baker Kline, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Victor LaValle, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, Douglas Preston, Roxana Robinson, George Saunders, Scott Turow, and Rachel Vail.

‘Without Plaintiffs’ and the proposed class’ copyrighted works, Defendants would have a vastly different commercial product,’ stated Rachel Geman, a partner with Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel for Plaintiffs and the Proposed Class. ‘Defendants’ decision to copy authors’ works, done without offering any choices or providing any compensation, threatens the role and livelihood of writers as a whole.’”

JC: Early on, you have a scene in which May waits in a pharmacy for her pain medications, and another customer says increasingly loudly, “I need a person.” How close are we to having hums or AI-robots handling customer service?

HP: I don’t know, but already the NYPD is using robot dogs.

JC: May’s “splurge” from for this financial windfall is to reward her husband Jem, daughter Lu and son Sy, with a three-day vacation at the Botanical Garden, a rare oasis of flora, fauna, food, clean water, meadows, relaxation. She asks that they leave their devices at home and experience the natural world (within borders). This leads to unexpected consequences. I’m wondering at what point you figured out the plotlines that developed once the family settles into the Botanical Garden (or diorama, as May ends up calling it).

HP: The image of a lush green wilderness in the middle of the city was one of the earliest seeds of the book. Partially because, as a city-dweller, I always find those places so compelling (Prospect Park, Green-Wood Cemetery, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden). But also because I wanted to explore humans’ relationships (and especially children’s relationships) with nature in a world where so much of nature is under threat. The plotlines and complications that develop in the Botanical Garden spring in large part from May’s quest for authenticity—for real nature, for real connection.

JC: The evolution of the hums puts them in charge of compiling video and other data on May and her family, making decisions about her competence as a mother, evaluating and judging her in many ways. It’s a suspenseful buildup. Do you see this as a possible next step for AI? Are we wise to be concerned?

HP: One evening some years ago, I was walking home from work when the thought crossed my mind that I needed new dishcloths. I got home and opened my computer and dishcloths were immediately advertised to me. This gave me an eerie feeling (though I went ahead and bought them). That discomfort I felt became a seed for Hum. Perhaps it isn’t such a big deal if the algorithm knows me well enough to advertise me dishcloths, but what if that kind of surveillance is taken to its logical extreme? Then, the danger becomes more apparent.

JC: Climate change has affected your Hum universe throughout, from May feeling “homesick for the forest, the way it was before it burned,” to Lu obsessing about the daily air quality index to the kids discussing animals going extinct and more. What sort of research went into the climate change theme in Hum?

HP: I read a lot about climate change when writing Hum, but the book that most informed my process was The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells. I was particular interested in (perturbed by) the chapter about air quality.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

HP: I’m working on a collection of short stories. And I’m gathering notes for my next novel.

__________________________________

Hum by Helen Phillips is available from S&S/Marysue Rucci Books.