It can be funny to look at science fiction writing of the past and see what people thought the twenty-first century would be like. From shared societies with alien civilizations to peaceful utopias to time travel, writers of years past thought we’d be living a pretty exciting life here in 2026.
But much of what might sound like the wild inventions of a nineteeth-century author have come true—they’re just so banal that we don’t think of them as being like living in a sci-fi novel. Modern medicine has people walking around with devices implanted in their bodies that help keep them alive, the vast majority of people you interact with on a day-to-day basis have a tiny gadget that can connect them to anyone else in the world in an instant, and in April of this year, a group of astronauts made a trip around the moon only to land safely back on Earth.
However, the one technological advancement that isn’t so fun to think about is artificial intelligence. AI is a particularly sore subject for authors, whose work has been used to train these chatbots without their permission. Even if you’re a writer who doesn’t have any ethical qualms about the casual use of ChatGPT, well, it can still feel difficult to write science fiction when you have more of an idea of how those once far future technological advances actually started out. It can be easy to feel envious of people like Jules Verne, who had full reign to speculate, while twenty-first-century genre writers have more of a real-life basis they feel they have to work around and with.
Whether you love or hate chatbots, science fiction as a genre of writing can be just as inventive and interesting as it was before search engine results started giving you an AI summary at the top of the page.
Have Some Perspective
It’s very common for people to have very strong feelings one way or another toward AI use and to be completely bewildered by people on the “other side.” If you love your chatbot and use it for everything in your day-to-day life, you might be laughing at your Luddite friends who you feel will be left in the dust. If you think it’s ridiculous to ask a predictive text program what you should have for lunch, you likely don’t have a high opinion of those users.
Good stories bring us into the minds of people who aren’t like us. If you can imagine the internal life of a spaceship captain who has never seen Earth and is part of a collective hive mind, you can imagine why someone might want to have someone—or something—write up a resume for them. That doesn’t mean you have to agree with it, but you do need some kind of insight as to what drives those behaviors that takes the other person’s humanity into account.
Whether you’re writing a near or far future world, use our contemporary debates around AI use as inspiration. Lots of science fiction writers in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries wrote incredible books with themes about the ethics of tech and the idea of a fully conscious digital personality. The real-life basis we have now should give you direction to think about your themes from a place of curiosity, not judgment.
Understand the Tech
Of course, what we are commonly calling artificial intelligence isn’t really a fully conscious, independent personality like in sci-fi novels. (At least, as far as we know . . .) Depending on what tool or platform you’re using, today's AI can predict what text would likely come up next with regards to your prompt terms, what parts of the image in your photo you’d want to erase, put together videos based on a library of content, and so on.
A savvy science fiction reader would pick up a book where a far future ChatGPT is an independent personality and may wonder, When did that happen? That would arguably not really work as a creative imagining of the future based on chatbots as we know them now.
Even if you aren’t using real-life examples to build your fictional world, when a contemporary reader encounters the letters AI, they have certain ideas about what that means. It’s your job as the author to set up AI for your readers in the same way you would have to do some very specific world-building to write a far future book in a world where spaceships have artificial gravity, or we discovered life on the surface of the sun.
Forget About All of It
What’s the point of writing science fiction if you have to deal with facts anyway? Maybe your creative drive comes from building a world wholly unlike our own, and you want to write a sentient AI that has nothing to do with what your email software is using to summarize your correspondence.
If that’s the case, well, you likely don’t need any advice, just encouragement. There are lots of readers who would love to continue engaging in their favorite genre fiction without having to constantly be mired in reminders of our fraught day-to-day debates around AI use.
It’s easy to feel like preinternet writers had all the fun, and now we’re stuck with a technological reality that we either actively dislike or maybe just feels like a weight around our necks when it comes to inventing our own futures. But just because we are making strides in things like space travel, which once seemed like an impossible dream, doesn’t mean you have to keep your imagination held down by gravity.
Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog. When not writing or reading, she is a fiber and textile artist who sews, knits, crochets, weaves, and spins.
