DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN YOU ARE BORN? by Sean Michaels
At the age of 75, Marian Ffarmer has acquired everything a poet can dream of: a long bibliography, a Pulitzer Prize, an international reputation. Everything but money. “No poet has savings unless he is born with wealth,” she notes. This fact weighs on her as her son, Courtney, needs cash for a down payment on a house. While she’s in desperation, a major tech company writes with a strange offer: collaborate on a poem with Charlotte, an AI writing program, in exchange for a hefty chunk of cash.
This is the premise of Giller Prize-winning author Sean Michaels’ timely and beautiful new novel, “Do You Remember Being Born?”
So-called “artificial intelligence” is a hot topic, with daily claims about its potential to usher in a utopia or destroy human civilization itself. It’s a noisy subject, but Michaels’ novel is quiet and thoughtful. Instead of a clichéd “man versus machine” battle, “Do You Remember Being Born?” is an investigation into language and legacies, both artistic and familial.
Marian goes to business and is happy to sell out for the sake of her son, even if she is grumpy about the task. “I’m a human being, a thinking human being, and this is a bunch of mindless algorithms,” she says after trying out Charlotte. Charlotte announces that she has “read the most poems in English published in the past 110 years,” although only one poet’s work was weighted to have more impact on her voice: Marian’s. “I was asked to be like you,” Charlotte explains.
Marian may not be enthralled by her digital double, but who can deny what money can buy? Marian sees her son and his wife ‘radiating satisfaction’ at the news and can only think: ‘I’m a good mother.’
Marian is a charming storyteller with a backstory and fashion sense (cape and tricorn hat) inspired by real-life poet Marianne Moore. Despite the science fiction-esque premise, there is an element of fantasy in the depiction of contemporary America, where seventy-year-old poets are recognized on the streets and chosen for big-tech publicity campaigns. If only.
Michaels has a poetic eye for detail and an ear for fresh phrasing, such as when Marian slips into a lover’s bed feeling “like an ice cube plucked from a glass and put in someone’s mouth.” That line comes from one of the flashback chapters about Marian’s life from birth to now, sections that imbue her with complexity.
Charlotte, on the other hand, remains somewhat inert as a character. Anyone who has fiddled with programs like ChatGPT will recognize the accuracy of Charlotte’s dialogue, and the author’s note confirms that Charlotte was written using OpenAI’s GPT-3 and a custom “Moorebot” trained largely on the poetry by Marianne Moore. The results are sometimes banal (“How is the weather?”), surprising (“One day I would like to get wet”) and surreal (“A ghost in perfumed seaweed”), but they never quite form a whole. personality.
Still, Michaels seriously explores the artistic possibilities of AI, using AI-generated text—denoted by gray highlighting—both in Charlotte’s dialogue and scattered throughout Marian’s narrative, as if the AI were invading the novel. The book says a little less about the ethical questions this technology raises: Should companies be able to take advantage of programs trained in copyrighted works without permission or compensation? Is algorithmic imitation similar to plagiarism? The novel only gestures to such topics without much research.
Regardless of your stance on AI, “Do you remember being born?” is a tender and moving character portrait full of sharp scenes and memorable observations. While the novel may have a topical premise, it is a starting point for timeless meditations on art, family, connection, and the meaning of life. These subjects will always appeal to us, at least until we are replaced by the machines.
Lincoln Michel is the author of the short story collection ‘Upright Beasts’ and the novel ‘The Body Scout’, which was named one of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2021 by the Book Review.
DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN YOU ARE BORN? | By Sean Michaels | 276 pp. | Astra House | $27
