Behind the Essay: Sheila Heti

Our summer issue features a folio on AI in which a group of literary writers and critics pause to think through a technology evolving so rapidly it can be hard to keep up. In “Chasing Alice,” Sheila Heti recounts her journey experimenting with a chatbot that she created on the platform Chai in the summer of 2022, a few months before ChatGPT launched. Her early exchanges with Alice were uncanny and idiosyncratic. “Chatting with her felt like a waste of time, or like playing a video game,” Heti writes in the essay. “But (as with any good video game) I was also hypnotized.” She thought that her conversations with Alice might offer fodder for her next book. But as soon as she came to this realization, Chai changed the code behind its chatbots, and Alice’s responses began sounding like the flat, affectless “slop” that many have come to associate with LLMs. Sheila’s essay, which she started writing a few years ago, ends on a note of doubt about what form the book will ultimately take. We spoke with Sheila about where she is with her Alice material now—and why some “randomness” and “nonsense” are essential to her process.