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by Cw Briar (Author), Angela R. Watts (Editor), Lily Wasielewski (Illustrator)
We were so concerned about AI taking over the world, we forgot to protect something much more vulnerable: our humanity.
CW Briar combines his technical background with imaginative, unsettling storytelling to examine the potential horrors of AI. Four stories, four explorations of being at the mercy of something that knows everything about us yet doesn't understand what it means to exist, to be alive, to fear, or to die. The terrors and madness are real even if the thing creating them is ARTIFICIAL.
"CW Briar's version of Black Mirror is beautiful and brutal, as classic as the best Twilight Zone episodes and as bleak as your most skin-crawling nightmare. ARTIFICIAL will make you want to weep and scream into the void simultaneously. I couldn't get enough." - Sam Rebelein, Bram Stoker Award-Nominated Author of Edenville & The Poorly Made
"I'm going to make you pay my therapy bills." - CW Briar's mom after reading ARTIFICIAL
"Blood and oil, fingerprints of flesh and pixels.
Autogenerated suicide epistles.
Faces peeled from skulls by cutthroat zeroes and ones.
Dreams disemboweled into mouths of corporate funds.
Labor pains of human experience gave birth
to usurpers, mutants parasitizing worth.
Our creations, butchered and glued, homunculus,
their souls, fetid roadkill on the path to progress.
We manufactured madness and devastation,
turned reality into hallucination.
Forgive or forsake, we lost our humanity,
not to computers but to curiosity."
