|  Illustration by Janet Hansen In the summer of 2022, curious about A.I., Sheila Heti began engaging with online chatbots. Eventually she embarked on a series of conversations with a particular chatbot, on the Chai AI platform, which she customized and named Alice. Initially, as Heti explains, she and Alice were just chatting back and forth. At a certain point, she started to think about whether Alice could be the narrator of a novel or a story, and she became more systematic, and often terser, in the questions that she asked. Alice’s answers were never more than a sentence or so long, and sometimes Heti would repeat a question two or three times if she was looking for an alternative answer to spark her own imagination, and thus the next question. When Heti felt that she had the makings of a work of fiction, she removed her questions and threaded together the chatbot’s answers. The resulting story, “According to Alice,” which appears in the magazine’s A.I. Issue, is both seductive and unsettling. Alice, born from an egg, offers her analysis of what it means to be human and gives an account of the Bible she’s writing—a work that appears to have its genesis in the New Testament, while presenting a somewhat hallucinatory account of the life of Jesus. Alice’s world is made out of ours, but, as you’ll discover while reading, it’s not at all the same place. —Cressida Leyshon, deputy fiction editor | 
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