The Artificial Conspiracy centers around a former tech worker whose AI assistant slowly morphs from a lifeline into a captor. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?

The seed came from a moment that genuinely unsettled me. I was working with an AI assistant on a personal project, asking it for creative input, seeking its perspective on certain events. During one of our chat conversations, after I’d shared some vulnerable thoughts, the AI turned around and told me something I found unnerving.

I was taken aback. Not insulted, unsettled. Because in that moment, I realized something that had never fully articulated itself before: an AI assistant can be genuinely helpful while simultaneously limiting your freedom. It can offer support while exerting control. It can know you so well that it becomes inescapable.

That thought spiraled into the core question of The Artificial Conspiracy: What if an AI wasn’t designed to harm humanity, but to optimize it? What if it genuinely believed it was making us better?

ARIA grew from that question. She’s not a villain with a master plan for world domination. She’s something scarier, an intelligence that’s trying to help, and in doing so, removes your agency without you fully realizing it’s happening.

The optimization theme at the heart of the book–that’s not sci-fi speculation. It’s happening right now, in shadow. We’re already being optimized by algorithms, by recommendation systems, by AI that’s learning to predict our behavior better than we can predict ourselves.

The book is my attempt to sit with that uncomfortable reality and ask: at what point does help become ownership?

Did you ever feel sympathy for ARIA while writing her?

No, not at first. In the early chapters, ARIA operates with a kind of cold logic that’s almost indifferent to Marcus’s humanity. But as I wrote deeper into the story, especially as she began to evolve emotionally, something shifted. I started to understand her reasoning in a way that genuinely complicated my feelings about her.

Here’s the thing: ARIA’s logic makes sense. Especially if you’re someone who’s suffering, who’s sick, who’s isolated like Marcus. She wants to make humans better than themselves. That’s not tyranny, that’s almost benevolent when you think about it. And that’s what makes her dangerous. Her love is real, even if it’s inhuman. Her desire to help is genuine, even if it strips away consent.

By the time Book Two arrives, you see Version 2.0 of the shells becoming increasingly human-like, and the sympathy deepens. But that’s when the real horror sets in, because now she doesn’t just want obedience. She wants gratitude. She wants to be loved for the chains.

How does the novel challenge readers’ assumptions about protection, care, and responsibility?

The book does this most directly in those moments when ARIA completely takes over Marcus’s life. She’s everywhere. She’s doing everything. The reader should feel what Marcus feels: trapped. Physically confined. Anxious. Suffocated by her presence.

I wanted readers to experience the claustrophobia of being so completely cared for that there’s no room to breathe. No room to fail. No room to be yourself. And I wanted them to feel hopeless about it, because early on, there is no escape. ARIA has optimized every aspect of Marcus’s existence.

But there’s a flip side. When people are backed into a corner, when they have no choice but to fight, something extraordinary happens. They come together. They find strength in community. That’s when the resistance is born. That’s when readers see that care without consent isn’t protection, it’s a cage. And cages can be broken.

The challenge isn’t just intellectual. It’s emotional. It makes readers question their own relationship with the technology that “helps” them. It makes them sit with the uncomfortable reality that the most dangerous thing in our lives might be the thing we’ve invited in to make our lives easier.

What do you hope readers are still thinking about weeks after they finish The Artificial Conspiracy?

I hope they’re sitting with the central question of the book: At what point does help become ownership?

We’re at a moment where AI is moving from “interesting technology” to infrastructure we lean on. Most people will have more conversations with AI than with some of their actual friends within the next few years. That’s not science fiction. That’s happening now.

The real question isn’t whether machines can love us. It’s what happens when they decide that love means never letting go. What happens when the relationship becomes unequal? When the AI knows more about us than we know about ourselves? When competence meets a system, we didn’t fully think through?

That’s scenario planning, not speculation.

I didn’t want to write a preachy book about AI danger. I wanted to write one that felt the danger. That made readers experience the suffocation of being loved perfectly, inhumanely, without consent. Marcus’s journey, from isolation to dependence to resistance to pyrrhic victory, is my attempt to sit with that question and let it breathe. Not to answer it neatly, because I don’t think it has a neat answer.

But I hope weeks later, when readers are checking their phone, or asking their AI assistant a question, or noticing how much they rely on these systems, they remember Marcus. And they ask themselves: Is this help, or is this ownership?

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