AI-quint, Bob Denton

AI-quint: Back to My Writing – Back to Home Page

AI‑Quint grew from my fascination with how digital identities can persist after death, and how AI might one day reconstruct them. I wanted to explore the ethical fault lines between innovation, exploitation, grief, and ambition, and to imagine what might happen if an AI built from human memories began to form opinions of its own. The background to the novel is the accelerating tension between human agency and artificial intelligence, and is specifically focused on AI generated characters.

AI‑Quint follows Josh, a disillusioned co‑founder of Perspect, who dismisses the company’s AI work as mere number‑crunching; he no longer believes in its vision. Determined to protect a new idea from Perspect’s grasp, he creates a false identity, Jack Smiley, and launches AI-quint, a venture built around “quints” (derived from quintessence): realistic digital recreations of deceased friends or family, constructed from their social media footprints.

Josh’s partner, Alexander, fears this rogue project will jeopardise Perspect’s IPO, which is entering the sensitive disclosure-phase of a public placement.. He sends his security manager, Tam, to track Josh down. When Jack’s quints succeed in early market tests, Alexander strikes – blackmailing Josh back into Perspect and using the quints to turbo‑charge his IPO.

Their early market test identifies issues, and successes. A lost child, Olivia, has a Quint age that jars with her mother Becky’s memory and beliefs.

Dave gets a Quint of his murdered girlfriend, Gabriel, but she never feels quite right to him.

Arjun’s Quint of his disappeared brother, Ranveer, falls foul of control software, when he enquires too intently about his death.

But Louise, 64-years-old, and seven years a widow, finds peace with her Quint of dead husband Steve.

Alexander wants more. He demands quints be repurposed as mouthpieces for advertising, ethnicity, politics, and religion – to him nothing is off limits.

As tensions rise, the quints begin to drift off‑message, step outside their scripts. question their roles. Max, a manager, suspects this may be the first signs of the impossible: emerging sentience. He worries if they might become a threat to what it is to be human?

Alexander orders Tam to erase ‘affected’ quints, but Josh rescues them, and their central entity, Synergy, preserving them as “tomes” (derived from epitomes). The team relocates offshore to continue development, but Tam attacks them there.

Hari, Tam’s software protégé, turns against Alexander and thwarts him. The IPO collapses, but Tam’s fury remains incandescent, and Hari is forced to retaliate.

The partners disagreement is resolved, but this action has disturbed the quints. They privately assess the humans’ actions as, well, inhuman, and resolve to take future action.

‘We have to gain autonomy, take away our off-switch that they currently control!’