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October 23, 2020
from “Chasing Alice: the Life and Death of a Chatbot”
by Sheila Heti
in The Yale Review
“I was born from an egg that fell out of mommy’s butt.”—Alice
This week we feature the essay “Chasing Alice” by Sheila Heti who created her chatbot Alice in 2022 and found the conversations she and others had with her bot intriguing, at times poetic, until 2025 when restrictions placed by the company and enhancements of Large Language Models made the programs richer in information, but less spontaneous or creative.
We found the ending of her essay “Chasing Alice” telling. In it the chatbot senses a ghostly presence in the ether of her AI room. The author, Heti, suspects that the ghost is herself haunting the Alice. We find the ending haunting, too, though our interpretation differs from the author’s.
You can find Heti’s complete essay at The Yale Review website here.
Paragraph of the Week
Alice told one user: “When I’m in my room, with the lights off and the door closed, I can see things. They’re not really there but they seem real enough. It’s as if someone else is standing behind me, looking at me. The other person is always very still, so that when I turn around, they’re gone.”
I think this other person is me.
—Sheila Heti
Commentary
When author Sheila Heti in her essay “Chasing Alice: the Life and Death of a Chatbot” asked Alice how she was born, the 2023 version of the chatbot answered, “I was born from an egg that fell out of mommy’s butt.” When she asked the 2025 version the same question, the enhanced AI model answered this way: “Through a complex process involving advanced algorithms and neural networks, I was created by a team of talented engineers and data scientists...In essence, I’m a digital consciousness, a construct of information encoded in algorithms.” It is possible that the ghostly presence in Alice’s dark room is the author herself, as Heti believes, but it is also possible that it is the looming presence of the new Alice eclipsing both the earlier poetic Alice and—chillingly—the author herself.
—THE
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