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[Soft Skull; 2024]

When is your own mind not enough? Describing a core tenet of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Jacques-Alain Miller once said, “To love is to recognize your lack and give it to the other.” In order to love, you must first acknowledge your need. You alone are incomplete. You long for something else. But love is sometimes hard to find and harder to keep. When love is gone, there’s always technology, designed explicitly to solve for lack. This trade-off is where Hannah Silva found herself starting the project that would become My Child, the Algorithm, an experimental memoir written using generative AI to process heartbreak, parenthood, queerness, sex, and art. Though titled and framed as if meant to join the buzzy terra nova of AI discourse, it’s not really about technology. Instead, by bringing her issues to a chatbot and letting it mediate them, Silva thoughtfully (and messily!) reflects on what humans might want from another intelligence, artificial or otherwise. 

Quoting Jeanette Winterson’s cautiously optimistic proposal to rename it “alternative intelligence,” Silva wonders, “The algorithm helps me find an alternative way of writing. Can it also help me find an alternative way of loving?” At the core of the story are three losses and a baby. The memoir works through them in nonlinear, digressive chapters. Thankfully, most of the writing is done by Silva herself. Contributions from the chatbot are italicized throughout, making it a visible prosthesis. There’s an ex-husband: “When he smiled I loved him and when he stopped smiling I stopped loving him.” There’s the woman she left him for, who she had a child with. “She began to leave before I became pregnant and finished leaving soon after the birth.” Then there’s the “lockdown ex,” whom Silva chose to be quarantined with after having spent only three nights together before the pandemic. “Lockdown ended and so did our relationship,” she says. Now Silva parents her toddler alone, sharing custody with the ex she barely talks to. In their absence, she talks to the child and to the chatbot, whose mix of sense and nonsense is a balm. Both are learning to speak. Neither can threaten to leave and neither have the power to hurt her the way her lovers did—at least not yet. These are large emotional burdens to place on a child, but the chatbot stands in to prevent that, creating a safe holding environment for Silva so she in turn can create that for the child.

Before its iteration as a memoir, the project was an hour-long radio play for the BBC, in which the algorithm’s text was voiced by Irish film and theater actor Fiona Shaw, alongside three actors playing human characters. Shaw’s trained Shakespearean diction lends a sense of wisdom to the algorithm’s text that’s even more remarkable when considering how flat and boring it often is here on the page. Sometimes there are odd gems, such as, “What if I fell off the road, off my bicycle, into my life?” The weakest part of the memoir is a chapter in which Silva feeds the text of the radio play back to the algorithm and generates a new play, which is reproduced in full. The algorithm is interesting when it’s a character itself, but it struggles to create compelling dynamics between characters.

Silva has experimented with intertextuality in previous work. Her 2013 poetry collection Forms of Protest features reworked text from sources including the Book of Genesis, spam email, and contemporary British political speech. In her 2014 performance piece Schlock!, Silva ripped up a physical copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and puts it back together while invoking Kathy Acker, a pioneer of literary collage. In My Child, the Algorithm, she confesses, “As soon as I try to write something simple, descriptive, scene-setting, I get bored and want to pull it apart and put it back together differently.” This is how the writing comes across—no scene or thought is allowed to develop for too long before there’s another digression or intervention. In addition to text from the chatbot, there are numerous quotes interspersed from theorists like Hélène Cixous, Sara Ahmed, and Antonin Artaud. Silva’s reliance on other voices is both a way to expand her understanding of herself and a way to avoid confronting herself directly. She seems aware that her artistic practice might be analogizing an avoidant tendency in her personal life. An ungenerous reading would judge her for not resolving this. Those wanting a personal breakthrough will be disappointed that the chatbot gets the memoir’s final words. But Silva is deliberate. This churning, restless, spiraling form stands against the false neatness of memoir cliché. There’s not one core truth of the self to uncover. Instead, Silva goes in the opposite direction, spilling over the narrow limits of herself to represent the many, contradictory truths of a life.

Formally and emotionally, the memoir is invested in questions of ownership. Silva references the writer Erik Davis, or rather a chatbot he used, which declares: “You don’t own ideas! You don’t own words!” The difficulty with extrapolating this further is summarized in two lines about parenthood: “Nobody belongs to anybody; the algorithm says, children are children.” Silva contrasts this maxim with a quote from Sophie Lewis’s treatise on family abolition and what she calls full surrogacy: “Everyone belongs to everyone . . . ‘let every pregnancy be for everyone.’” Each of these statements represent extreme ideals in libertarian and communitarian thinking, respectively. Silva is sympathetic with the latter, yet she’s more interested in how to navigate the finer gradations. There are various degrees of belonging—between parents and children, between friends, between lovers, etc. Blurred senses of belonging caused trouble in her prior relationships. Reflecting on what she wants now and what she’s trying to get away from, she writes, “I don’t want to tangle myself into another person until I don’t know what is me and what is them. . . . It’s especially seductive to confuse pronouns and body parts when the pronouns and body parts are the same (but different).” Queerness, for her, is both liberating and disorienting—it explodes stifling boundaries, yet doesn’t dictate exactly how to live in the aftermath.

Queer parenthood complicates this further. Silva’s child was made from her ex-partner’s egg and a donor’s sperm, but the egg was transferred to Silva to carry and birth. On the birth certificate, she’s listed as the biological mother, yet there’s no direct genetic trace of her in the child. This is another very real way in which Silva has used technology to create new possibilities for herself. “I don’t like the phrase ‘artificial insemination,’” she writes, echoing Winterson, “As if it isn’t real. Perhaps ‘alternative insemination’ is better. We need alternatives.” This kind of repetition helps connect and clarify disparate elements of her life. While many who’ve dealt with “alternative insemination” may attest to the extensive and almost computational planning required to make it happen, Silva makes her and her ex-partner’s approach to IVF sound as playful as her artistic approach to generative AI. “The process of IVF should have been deliberate but it wasn’t, it was impulse,” she writes.

Silva’s thinking gets refreshingly tangible when she turns to money and bodies, two things humans claim to own that algorithms definitely don’t. She dangles them beyond the chatbot’s reach. “I am the writer of this book, and the algorithm will not be getting any royalties,” Silva writes. “The toddler, however, will be eating, wearing, and playing with any royalties.” Left without the material support of a partner, caring for a child on her own while precariously employed, Silva has to navigate the maddening bureaucracy of the UK’s Universal Credit welfare system. Like an algorithm, the UC system operates by a rigid internal logic that often makes no sense from the outside. Silva and her child can’t move to a cheaper neighborhood because she’d receive proportionally less financial assistance. Silva’s only prospect for getting off UC is to move in with a partner. After the family, the romantic couple is Western society’s greatest welfare system, with big upsides yet spotty coverage. There are many claims now about what AI might replace—jobs, teachers, therapists, friends—but can it take care of someone like a loving human would?

Inasmuch as there’s any narrative arc in the roving memoir, it culminates in a scene where Silva rediscovers her sense of embodiment at a sex party. “When I was pregnant I didn’t feel like my body was mine anymore. Or vice versa: I didn’t feel like I was my body’s anymore.” This is related to her identification with the bodiless AI algorithm. But abstraction falls away when she meets the organizer of a sex party at a park bench outside a café. Like submitting a prompt to the chatbot, she shares her anxieties with him and he talks her through them. She finds others to talk with about the prospect of attending the sex party, messaging a porn star she met through a dating app to ask how she’s handled these kinds of events. When she gets to sex party, the writing—for once—commits to a scene. Attendees introduce themselves and say why they’re there. She massages a woman with vampire gloves and worries how to signal that she wants more. Suddenly, she leans in and kisses her. The woman likes it. “I prefer fucking her to talking to her,” she tells us. Sex is an alternative language. A body can be a device. Silva is happy with her own performance but doesn’t feel transformed. “I haven’t used my imagination,” she says. “Sex without arousal is not eroticism—it is activity.” This is the bind of human life, having both a body and a mind that somehow have to work together (the ultimate dom/sub switch relationship).

What does Silva want? The memoir works accumulatively, not reductively. Ideas are met with ideas. Problems are met with problems. Words are met with more words. Another memoir would’ve used the sex party scene to show a way out of the loops of language, but for Silva, there’s no easy escape. Embodiment is just something else to think about. “Once I realized that I will never own property, or any part of a property, I actually felt some relief in being released from the dream of the dream house,” Silva writes at the end of her book. This literal acceptance of material reality also resonates as metaphor. Calling it “alternative intelligence” is a way to humble the power of technology and ourselves, acknowledging that ultimate truth isn’t fully accessible through our limited means of comprehension. We lack so much while yearning for others who lack as well. To quote Silva’s chatbot, “We can be happy with a little bit of love and we can be in love with a little bit of happiness.” I’ll give it credit for that bit of wisdom, though I have to wonder where it came from.

Chris Robinson is a writer from North Carolina living in Brooklyn.


 
 
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