Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti (born 1976 in Toronto) is one of the most formally adventurous novelists of her generation, best known for “How Should a Person Be?” (2010), “Motherhood” (2018), and “Pure Colour” (2022). Her books blur fiction, diary, and philosophy — a restlessness that made her an unlikely but natural early adopter of AI as a literary instrument.

Writing with Alice

In the summer of 2022 Heti began long conversations with a customizable chatbot she named Alice on the Chai platform, steering it toward questions of God, death, and selfhood. The Paris Review published the transcripts that November as the five-part series “Hello, World!” — and in November 2023 The New Yorker ran her short story “According to Alice,” which Heti composed by deleting her own questions and threading together the chatbot’s answers.

Heti’s stance is fascinated exploration rather than boosterism. In a 2024 talk at Western University she described the collaboration as genuinely shared — “You can see this collaboration happening. It’s her and me” — while insisting that AI text “comes out of randomness” and that art without human stakes has “no tension in it.” Her 2024 Yale Review essay “The Life and Death of an AI Chatbot” chronicled what happened when the platform hosting Alice changed, treating a piece of software with the elegiac attention novelists usually reserve for people.

While many of her peers signed protest letters against AI training, Heti chose the opposite experiment: finding out what the machines are actually like from the inside, and turning the encounter into literature.