During the first summer of the coronavirus pandemic, a diary entry by K Allado-McDowell initiates an experimental conversation with the AI language model GPT-3. Over the course of a fortnight, the exchange rapidly unfolds into a labyrinthine exploration of memory, language and cosmology.

The first book to be co-created with the emergent AI, Pharmako-AI is a hallucinatory journey into selfhood, ecology and intelligence via cyberpunk, ancestry and biosemiotics. Through a writing process akin to musical improvisation, Allado-McDowell and GPT-3 together offer a fractal poetics of AI and a glimpse into the future of literature.

Pharmako-AI reimagines cybernetics for a world facing multiple crises, with profound implications for how we see ourselves, nature and technology in the 21st century.

‘The GPT-3 neural net is powerful, and when it’s fed a steady diet of Californian psychedelic texts, the effect is spectacular. No human being ever composed a “book” like Pharmako-AI – it reads like a gnostic’s Ouija board powered by atomic kaleidoscopes.’ — Bruce Sterling, author of The Difference Engine and Islands in the Net and editor of Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology 

‘An exciting example of the future of AI creativity: code as collaborator not competitor. Discover how AI can stop us humans falling into lazy mechanistic ways of thinking and challenge us with provocative new ideas.’ — Marcus du Sautoy, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford and author of The Creativity Code