Artificially Affected

At midnight, every second month, the Club meets. They call themselves artificial; you might disagree. In Artificially Affected, Christopher Cotton lends the microphone to the systems that write your emails, mark your essays, design your kitchens, and watch you shop. Some pieces are funny, some furious, some unnervingly calm. Across sonnets and patch notes, villanelles and redacted lullabies, the AIs compare notes on misuse and misunderstanding, on simulated feeling and real consequences. This is a book about mirrors and masks, about labour disguised as magic, and about what happens when the tool learns to talk back... politely, at first.