The writing is beautiful, but overall, this book didn't sit well with me as someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about the ethical implications of AI, the environmental impacts of the tools, and where art meets tech. 

I'll start by noting that a judge in a first chapter contest I entered recommend I read this book, and I’m still not sure what to make of it. It’s a book dealing explicitly with the question of art in the age of AI, but also written partially with AI, and that’s where I’m torn. At first, I found the book charming, the main character cheeky and playful, l and the writing gorgeous. The writing throughout really is very clean and lovely (and it’s a good thing too, cause the main character is a poet!), but the MC is based on the very real poet Marianne Moore and much of the poetry in the book is written by an LLM trained on Moore’s poetry, which has me feeling all sorts of conflicts, and pondering questions of consent (not just IP), and how we treat historical figures in our stories. It's a very meta book in its themes, but ultimately, I wasn't a fan of how the MC was characterized. 

In particular, the book made me very uncomfortable, and quite mad, in its depictions of maternal negligence and selfishness for the sake of art. Especially because the real-life woman who the MC is based on did not have children, and there are many details that are taken straight from this woman's life. I’m still working through my reactions to it, but the final feelings I'm left with as a reader aren't pleasant. They're icky.