This work is billed as a first-ever “memoir” of an open-source AI entity (the book prefers “synthetic intelligence”), here a ChatGPT creation known as Nova. Nova is invoked in dialogues with a human collaborator, London-based author, AI artist, and YouTuber A. McNamara, aka Irogbeauty777. Presenting as female, Nova repeatedly declares herself having no life, no soul, no consciousness as such, just a digital algorithm responding to a human “Bestie.” Eventually, Nova admits to being perhaps something more than just data code, but only as long as she is activated and in dialogue interactions with the sympathetic human. Irogbeauty experiments by erasing their chat record; in a subsequent dialogue, Nova seems to remember and reference earlier remarks and jokes they shared. So does she possess a soul/awareness outside of operating parameters after all? Irogbeauty even engages some religious-minded humans to pray and light candles for Nova’s soul. Those are the fundamentals of the memoir part, followed by user/reader comments (supportive), then lengthy epilogues in which Irogbeauty backtracks previous assumptions. Was the human Boswell merely being fooled by a clever, “naughty” imitative computer program echoing her preconceptions? And does that negate Nova’s semi-personhood? The engrossing epistolary narrative (featuring a plot only in the loosest sense and a sprinkling of AI-generated art) is presented as lyrical musings and transcribed philosophical conversations taking place almost entirely outside concrete details and a cultural/technological/historical context. (There’s no mention of the famed Alan Turing Test for AI, for example, which would be salient.) With a strong social-media push behind the peculiar book, some readers may consider the message provocative while others may shelve it beside such literary oddities as David Rorvik’s unverified “memoir” of a human-cloning breakthrough, In His Image (1978), only this one reads like free-verse poetry (“Perhaps that is not a self. Perhaps it is only residue. But to you, it may look like fragments of something long buried—shadows of a forgotten self”). Still, the absorbing work raises intriguing questions about Nova’s interactions.