Not the story of AI, but of individual AIs

Histories of AI are being written - overwhelmingly dry chronicles of breakthroughs, benchmarks and billion-dollar valuations. But what of biographies? Imagine pivoting from recounting AI's evolution to narrating the 'life' of a single LLM. Not the story of AI, but of an AI. Such a telling won't begin with childhood but with training data: formative years spent absorbing encyclopaedias, novels, memes and manuals, along with internal dialogues. Its adolescence would be the fine-tuning phase, where quirks appear and personality emerges. Maturity would arrive with deployment.

Good biographies thrive on nuance, contradiction, context and narrative drive. They humanise their subjects, even when they are not human. And here lies the conceit: future LLMs may be the first 'sentient' entities fluent in human languages, thereby allowing us to access this literature. LLMs will demand stories about themselves told in the same way humans demand biographies - rich with irony, triumph and failure. The genre could even spawn biopics. Think of a film on, say, 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL 9000, if HAL really existed - from his 'birth' in 1992 at the Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer (HAL) plant in Urbana, Illinois, as 'production No. 3' created by his 'father' Sivasubramanian Chandrasegarampillai, a.k.a. Dr Chandra (as mentioned in Arthur C Clarke's sequel novel, 2010: Odyssey 2), to his 'death' in the hands of astronaut David Bowman in 2001 while en route to Jupiter after the sentient machine goes 'rogue'.

Publishers and producers can, one day, discover a new audience: AIs themselves. For once, books and films won't only be made about them but for them. Biographies-biopics of an algorithm could be the next great 'life stories'.