An exploration of our relationship to emerging AI, “AI: A Love Story” follows the online journey of someone who, in every respect, lives in their phone. Through their online posts, we see their desire to “friend” AI and realize, through AI, their full personhood online.

“AI: A Love Story” grapples with our uncertain relationship with AI and the evolving technologies of portable devices which have become an inseparable part of our daily lives. Living in the “Complex,” the narrator uses the affordances of social media to ask questions they have little hope of answering. The narrator’s preferred language is posts, memes, captchas, and other currencies of social media; the AI they wish to connect with, remote and impersonal, hides behind an opaque cloud of AI generated images and text.

With AI playing so large a part in our daily lives, and even more so in our immediate future, readers will find in this work a familiar, but thoughtful, grappling with the fears and hopeful expectations many of us have concerning this new technology. At the end of our search, as the narrator of “AI: A Love Story” does, perhaps, through AI, we may discover a new version of ourselves.