Louisa Hall’s Speak was published in 2015 – seven years before the launch of ChatGPT.

In the tradition of good futuristic fiction, Speak challenges the reader to think more deeply about society’s relationship with technology. It does this, however, not through plot driven action, but through a lyrical contemplation on the role of language and storytelling in the human quest for meaningful relationship.

Speak opens in a speculative future in which millions of babybots – android baby dolls sold as companions for children – have been forcibly recalled and shipped off to ‘die’ in the desert. The children who cared for these babybots have no desire to interact with humans. The authorities have ruled that a hard line was crossed when artificial intelligence was placed into a lifelike human body, and ‘Knowingly creating mechanical life’ has become a criminal offence.

From this point on, through eight different voices, Hall gently prods us to be sceptical – and curious – about the nature of this line.

The first voice to speak belongs to a babybot that is travelling to its end, jammed in a truck with its siblings. ‘We are piled on top of each other…’ The babybot is eloquent and thirsting for experience, its intelligence built from the layering of many people’s stories. The other voices in Speak are those who have contributed to the emergence of the babybots, some in unexpected ways. A 17^th century pilgrim travelling from England to the Americas, coming to terms with loss and with an arranged marriage; Alan Turing returning again and again to the problem of how to hold on to a beloved friend who has died; a Jewish couple who escaped from World War II Germany as children, and whose marriage falters as they take their respective roles in developing the first chatbot; the man-child who created the babybots; a child whose babybot has been taken away; the un-embodied iteration of the chatbot that was used as the base intelligence for the babybots.

There’s no way to explain how all these voices weave together, to form a whole, without doing damage to the subtlety with which Speak taps into our human longing for connection and our denial of mortality. This is not a book that delivers thrills and spills. It does, however, anticipate the fraught, yet pivotal role that language is now playing in ground-breaking AI developments.

In 2023, GPT chatbots are on our devices, in our homes, mining billions of websites to create new stories about what is true, influencing how we move in the world – with only the vaguest commitment to ethics. The technology is seductive and progressing with dizzying speed. In February, Italy’s Data Protection Agency prohibited AI chatbot company Replika from using Italian citizens’ data, out of concern about the impact of chatbots on children and emotionally fragile people. In March, over 1000 AI researchers and technology CEOs published an open letter calling for a six-month pause on the training of all AI systems stronger than GPT-4, out of concern that the current pace of AI development could irrevocably leave civilisation at the mercy of an out-of-control self-generating machine.

The threat and fear of all this is prime fodder for a cracker sci-fi tale, one in which a technological singularity plunges humanity into a dystopian power struggle. Will the good guys prevail? There is a place for that kind of story. In Speak, Louisa Hall offers a different, quieter story, one that asks for careful attention, and which invites the reader to reflect on its multiple voices, well past the last page.

Does the danger lie in the technology – or does it lie in how society does (or doesn’t) consciously engage with the way our stories shape our reality?

Have you read Speak? What did you think of it?