I am fascinated by this first attempt in my experience of using an AI program to write a complete novel. The plot was compelling, and the main character was well written. The novel took place entirely from his point of view and he was experiencing difficulty in figuring out his own reality, due to a tragic accident and heroic attempts to restore him to health. The plot device which wove throughout the book was the existence of two completely different reality experiences. All good so far. Unfortunately, the role of editor was completely missing from the book. I realize that this was a review copy and thus not yet finalized, but the random changes in tense and voice were unnerving and annoying. I would love to blame this problem on the AI bot, but I would think that an author would be using the AI bot in a partnership situation and maybe contributing some clarity and style along the way. Perhaps this was the point? The AI is clunky and inept at storytelling? If this was the point, then what was the actual role of the human author?
Beyond these style issues, my only real complaint about the story is the lack of a clear ending. Perhaps I am too literal and don't feel satisfied unless the nature of the reality of the story is spelled out. I never liked Zen koans either, but just when I felt like we were getting somewhere in the plot, the book ended. ( )

Really interesting concept for a novel. Seeing the recent public interest in machine learning, I was curious how artists might be able to utilize this tool to enhance their work. For a collaboration between human and ML, a book with this premise makes complete sense.

The story itself was rather interesting. The two realities presented throughout the book were compelling as futures that had deeply integrated technology into all aspects of life. I do feel that the way in which the details of this world were presented could have been better. Namely, we often just have a character just describe to Dawson what some technology is, rather than have him learn through experiences, which felt awkward.

There were several things throughout the book that did not make sense in the moment. This included, but was not limited to, details about machine learning (and CS in general) that was off. Much of it ended up being explainable after reading the last chapter, but before that I found it rather frustrating & distracting. However, I imagine that for a reader that does not have a background in machine learning/CS, the oddities with ML would not be an issue.

My biggest complaint about this book is the writing style. ML-generated language is generally clunky, repetitive, & occasionally nonsensical. While this book (supposedly) has both human-written and machine-generated text, I found this problem with language was prevalent throughout. One could argue that the author was trying to match the machine's writing style in an attempt to throw off the reader on which parts were written by which contributor. This doesn't change the fact that it made for a worse reading experience. Yes, getting good language from a ML model is insanely difficult, but perhaps the author could have worked more with whatever model he was using to get better output.

Generally, this is a decent plot & the idea overall is interesting, but the execution did not really work for me. However, I'm coming at this with a decent CS/ML background - a reader with less background might be able to enjoy this more ( )

I am not going to lie, I struggled while reading this. I definitely had the same disorientation as the main character did while reading this, but I also found myself flipping backwards to remind myself of details from each reality. I was also hampered by missing the first 10 pages in the review copy I was sent (via Amazon). I definitely couldn't tell between the AI written and the author written parts.
( )

Since reading a few articles about open AI chat bots (one said it wanted to “escape” and had a “plan”), I have become a bit paranoid. Nevertheless, I thought it would be easy to discern the AI-generated chapters in K. R. Simms’s Parallel Realities. But it wasn’t. I started the book as if I were taking a test (ha, a Turing test!), so I wasn’t concerned with any emotional investment.

Simms includes sections wholly written by an AI, “a conversational AI system that listens, learns, and challenges,” or I have to assume he did. The narration is somewhat choppy and clunky throughout, so I wasn’t sure which segments were human-written first drafts or AI-generated. And, unfortunately, I was sometimes distracted by contradictions in the narration.

But aside from the initial challenge, the novel eventually provided my rational examination with many intriguing potentials in AI-human interactions: in government, law, and of course human relations. Trust is important in human relations, and that’s precisely what the main character doesn’t have -- with an AI-implant in his brain to save him from a catastrophic brain injury, he doesn’t know whether his “experiences” with his father and his doctor, among others, are “real” or not.

So for me Parallel Realities is about someone becoming extremely paranoid because he can’t determine real from manufactured experiences, read by a person already somewhat paranoid about AI who can’t determine the human from the manufactured prose.

Great Cover!

I received an early review copy from Librarything. This is an honest review. ( )

The idea of this book was intriguing, however, it ended up being disappointing. While I did find it difficult to determine what parts were AI written, it didn't really matter because there were too many distracting grammatical errors. This could still be a decent book, but it still needs some work to make it cohesive.