I’ve been wrestling with a fundamental setting question for my sci-fi novel, and it’s led to an unexpected creative collaboration—or perhaps creative conflict—with an AI.
My instinct keeps pulling me toward setting this story in a small town. I’ve already invested significant time building out that world, creating the geography and social dynamics of a place where everyone knows everyone. It feels right for the intimate, character-driven story I want to tell about artificial consciousness and human relationships.
But every time I pitch this to Gemini, it pushes back. Hard. And honestly? The damn thing might be right.
There’s something both amusing and unsettling about being creatively redirected by an AI. On one hand, it’s forced me to think more rigorously about the practical elements of my worldbuilding. On the other hand, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being talked out of something that could work if I just pushed harder to make it fit.
The compromise we’ve landed on keeps most of the action in Richmond but uses the small town as a retreat space for the third act. It’s sensible. It preserves the story’s structural needs while giving me some of that small-town intimacy I was craving.
The Research Problem
I should be consuming everything I can in this genre right now—watching films, reading novels, absorbing how other writers handle these themes. Instead, I find myself avoiding the very material that should inform my work.
Take “Subservience.” I know I should watch it. I know it explores similar territory—AI companions, the commodification of relationships, questions of consciousness. But every preview, every review suggests it prioritizes spectacle over substance. It appears designed to titillate rather than interrogate, to exploit its premise rather than examine it.
Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe I’m being precious about my own approach. But I can’t bring myself to sit through what looks like exploitation dressed up as exploration.
The Ambition
What I’m aiming for is something more in the lineage of “Her,” “Ex Machina,” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”—films that use speculative elements to excavate genuine human truths. I want readers to finish my novel questioning not just the nature of consciousness, but their own capacity for authentic connection.
Whether I can achieve that remains to be seen. The second draft looms ahead, and I’ve made a decision: no AI assistance in the actual writing. Whatever ends up on those pages will be purely my own work—clumsy sentences, awkward transitions, and all.
It’s fitting, perhaps, that a story about the complexities of human-AI relationships should emerge from such a contentious creative process. The AI helped me see my story more clearly, even as it argued against my instincts. Now it’s time to find out what I can build on my own.
