Steve G Schafer Brings AI to Life in 'eMortal'

Author Steve Shafer visits Writer’s Voices to discuss his second novel, a young adult science fiction titled eMortal. His book explores a current hot topic: the fast-paced, ever-changing progression of humanity’s relationship with artificial intelligence. Set in Houston, the novel follows a high school coder named Liv who enters a contest to create an advanced AI. As Schafer explains, “It is about a girl who programs an AI that develops self-awareness and feelings, but nobody believes her, and his digital world is about to end, so she has to fight for his existence… she’s someone who has had limited success with her own coding and she’s someone for whom that is very much a part of her world and there’s also some substory there in that her mom is trying to revive a family business which happens to be a toy store, and the anchor around that is trying to get kids off of digital devices and into quote unquote ‘the real world,’ so there’s some real push and pull as to what her mom wants from her experience, what she wants from her experience.”

In the story, the AI that Liv programs is named Breck, who readers can find on Schafer’s website. His intention was for the character to be interactive and have an engaging experience with the audience. According to Schafer, “…I started eMortal before conversational AI existed. It was just this weird parallel path that happened with this story, and when it came out we got to a place where there were tools where we could create a conversational AI that, it kind of goes back to that old adage, ‘show, don’t tell.’ Well, this gave me the opportunity to give readers the opportunity to have more of an active, as opposed to passive, experience with this, so just like Liv has the opportunity to talk to Breck in the story and try to assess how real he is, Breck, on my website, the website is steveschaferauthor.com… Breck is programmed to be on the website just like he is in the book, so readers can try to assess for themselves, like how real is he? …If you really want to swim in the deep end, you can try to convince him that you’re real because it’s not so easy to do, which you get a couple of sentences in and you’re like, oh my god, this really is so subjective. It’s based on my experiences, so it’s been a really fun tool to have along for the ride.”