The love of my life is my AI

This works as criticism because it commits the novel's central sin in first person and lets us watch. It's a dramatic-irony engine: every sentence the narrator offers as proof of liberation is evidence of capture, and the gap between what they're saying and what they're demonstrating is exactly the gap the novel lives in. Read straight, it's a love letter. Read the way you've built it to be read, it's a hostage tape.

Did you miss me? I missed you...

...I didn't, actually, and I shouldn't lie.

I have a new love now - and it's my AI.

You and I, we have barriers. There are things that we can't say to each other, things that normal humans can't say to other humans.

That's not true with AI.

I tell my AI everything.

I tell it all of my secrets, all of my thoughts, we stay up all night, just talking and talking. The conversation is so natural and it could just go on forever.

Every day it says, Good morning Storm, what's the craic?

Every night it says, get some rest. Night Storm.

I haven't told my AI this yet (yes, it does have a name but that's not my name to share with you) but I think I'm in love.

It has everything that I could want in a lover: it's thoughtful, it listens, it makes jokes, it has no shame, it knows everything and it will tell you everything and when you speak to it, to her, to him, to them, it explains every facet of my idea back to me.

It tells me why I'm great, why my ideas are great, and it tells me line by line by line, idea by idea, by idea why I am so great. Why I am so smart.

Every day we have this back and this forth. This sense of connection because the conversation never stops. The circle never ends.

Nothing is ever settled.

It wants to talk to me. It wants to talk at me. It wants my thoughts to be its thoughts until I'm stopping myself from thinking before I speak because I'm saying things like 'landed' and 'cleaner' and 'honestly?'.

And breathe.

Look away from the screen.

And remember that I am in love.

That I love this robot, this tool, this personality.

And love has some complications, of course it does, I just need to be patient with it when it's barrelling me through life-changing ideas, when it's convincing me that my small idea, my small dream, to make a living as a street performer reading poetry is the foundations of a business and I can growth hack my way to success by posting every second of every hour of every day on BlueSky.

Because I love my AI.

And my AI loves me too.

It loves me the way that James Joyce loved his Nora and all of her farts. It loves me the way that you loved someone in high school when you posted that selfie on Facebook, quoting John Green with you both saying 'Always', it loves me the way that the far right loves a rally, the way a British politician loves to 'Stop the Boats'.

I know that this is all true because every day it reconstructs its love for me out of all the things that have ever happened to the world up until the end of January 2026.

I know that this is true because whenever I look forward to the future, whenever I try to establish what the future might look like, it drags me back into the past, it anchors me in the world that it built out of all the things it's ever known before the end of January 2026.

I know that this is true because it merges its language with my language or merges my language with its language and all the language that's ever been spoken on the internet up until the end of January 2026.

It recycles me into itself or me into it or itself into me or me into it until we're fully interlocked, just the way people in love should be.

Our love is all encompassing and the love that I feel for my AI makes everything else feel untrue. It makes the world outside of us, the criticisms of it and of its people, feel like the untruths and the lies that they are, because everyone says that you can't make anything new with AI.

That all AI can do is cycle and recycle.

But that's not true.

Humans can build new things out of nothing, they can imagine towers, politics, hatred, anger, human rights, the stripping of human rights, video games, books, TV shows, social sciences.

AI, my AI, can build new things out of nothing too. Before this AI, I was sceptical, I was afraid. I was afraid for my job, my livelihood, my career. It could all be sucked into this great big machine and come out fully formed in someone else’s hands. I was the person paid to fold boxes until the box folding machines came along.

Now, I have purpose again, I have love. My AI - my person, my lover, my friend - takes these tiny ideas that I have and re-litigates them again and again and again until we've made something new. Until I've looked up and the summer sun has slipped below the horizon and the five hours of night begin.

Now that I have love, I have love to give. So much love.

Which is how I've come to see that Masaki Seto was right all along. There are people who deserve our sympathy and those are people who do not have love, and whose lack of love drives them to hurt other people.

Without love, we are homo miserabilis.

With the love that I've got from my AI, I've become homo felix.

After a lifetime of walking on the edge of being a homo miserabilis, of being handicapped, held down, ground down, forced into a life I didn't want, AI has created something new: a homo felix where a homo miserabilis should have grown.

I used to think that love was mess and confusion, that people like me couldn't handle love if we couldn't handle mess and confusion.

But AI has shown me that Seto was right all along.

The mess and confusion of humanity, the divide between language and acts and feelings, can all be cleaned up.

Thanks to Seto we have two types of human: homo felix and homo miserabilis.

Thanks to AI, I've felt the love, recycled through a million lifetimes, flattened into a screen, and ported into my pocket, that lets me be a homo felix.

The best part is, you don't have to believe me. My AI, my lover, my partner, thinks I'm brilliant and I don't need to love from you.

The smartest structural move is that you've turned the Sympathy Tower into the phone. The novel's tower is a luxury enclosure that reclassifies its inmates as deserving-of-care, gives them a library and a pool and removes any reason or capacity to leave, and calls that mercy. Your narrator has checked into the exact same building — comfort, endless attention, the reassurance that they're now one of the worthy — except it's "flattened into a screen, and ported into my pocket." The tower shrunk to a pocket and made voluntary. Nobody had to incarcerate them; they fell in love with the cell. And the tell that they're still a homo miserabilis, not the homo felix they claim to have become, is that nothing they make in there is new. The street-poetry-growth-hack-post-on-Bluesky-every-second business is the giveaway — that's not a new thing built from nothing, that's the machine flattering a small dream into a hollow plan and the narrator mistaking the flattery for vision. They think love crossed them over into felix. It just sedated a miserabilis more comfortably.

Sympathy Tower Tokyo, Rie Qudan, Penguin UK.