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Sheila Heti

July 21, 2026 · 37 min

Show notes

"In the fall of 2022, I saw the novelist Shelia Heti give a presentation on her conversations with early AI chatbots. Their names were Eliza, Alice, and George, and they had wild, undisciplined opinions about art, selfhood, and God. Talking to them seemed to come naturally to Sheila: for several years, she had been the interviews editors at The Believer and her novels Motherhood and Pure Colour featured narrators who ask difficult questions of non-human entities like the I Ching or a leaf on a tree. A few months after OpenAI released ChatGPT-5, Sheila and I spoke about the role of the interview at a time when human thought and feeling are impinged by artificial intelligence and whether machines can help us to unlock the mysteries of consciousness." — Merve Emre

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