What AI Fiction Sounds Like

There's a moment in every audiobook when the text stops being words on a page and becomes something else. A voice. A presence in your ear. The prose that seemed dry or distant when you read it suddenly has rhythm, breath, emphasis.

This happens with any audiobook. But it's especially strange when the text was AI-drafted.

PAYLOAD: Short Stories by Alden Pierce exists in three forms: paperback, ebook, and audiobook. The first two are silent. The third speaks. And hearing it changes how you think about what AI fiction is.

The Uncanny Valley, Reversed

Usually the uncanny valley works like this: the more human something tries to seem, the more we notice what's wrong with it. A robot that looks almost human is creepier than one that looks obviously mechanical. A synthetic voice that's almost natural sounds weirder than one that's clearly artificial.

But with AI fiction, the valley might run in reverse. Text on a page is one step removed from human. You process it silently, through your own internal voice. The AI origin stays visible, a fact about the text you're aware of as you read.

Add a human voice and something shifts. The narrator breathes. Pauses. Gives the sentences pace and weight. The voice humanizes the text, not by changing it but by performing it.

Whether this makes the text "more human" or just "seem more human" is a question that dissolves once you hear it. The distinction stops mattering. The stories are in your ear, sounding like stories, doing what stories do.

Voice as Interpretation

A narrator doesn't just read. They interpret. Every emphasis, every pause, every shift in tone is a choice about what the text means.

This is always true. But with AI-drafted text, the narrator's interpretation takes on additional weight. The AI generated prose based on patterns in language. It didn't "intend" anything in the way a human author does. The narrator, then, becomes the source of intention. They decide what the sentences are trying to do.

The stories in PAYLOAD are written in a cool, observational style. On the page, this reads as detachment. In audio, the same prose can become something else: restraint, precision, a deliberate refusal to tell you how to feel. The voice provides the emotional context that the text deliberately withholds. There's more to say about this.

Is this a collaboration between machine and human? Between text and voice? Between the absent "author" and the present narrator? All of the above, probably.

The Strange Loop

Here's where it gets genuinely strange. The text was drafted by AI. But AI learns from human text, including human audiobooks. So the prose carries patterns inherited from spoken language, rhythms that emerged from listening as much as reading.

When a human narrator reads that prose aloud, they're completing a loop. The text that came from (human) speech, passed through (AI) processing, returned to (human) text, is now (human) speech again. Each stage transforms it. None of them is the "original."

This loop is disorienting if you think about it too much. It suggests that the boundaries between human and machine communication are more porous than we assume. The AI didn't invent language. It learned from us. And we learn from it, including from how it reflects our patterns back to us.

The audiobook makes this audible. You're hearing a human speak words shaped by a machine that learned from humans speaking words. Where does the human end and the machine begin? The question assumes a clearer boundary than actually exists.

Listening While Doing Other Things

Audiobooks change how stories fit into life. You can listen while driving, cleaning, walking. The stories become ambient, threading through activities instead of demanding dedicated attention.

For PAYLOAD, this is fitting. The stories are about ordinary life, about the quiet emergencies that happen while you're doing something else. Listening to them while doing something else mirrors their subject matter. The fiction about distracted modern life enters your distracted modern life.

There's an argument that this is a lesser way to experience literature. That audiobooks sacrifice the concentration that deep reading requires. Maybe. But the PAYLOAD stories seem designed for interrupted attention. Their observational detachment works well at low volume, in the background, surfacing when a line catches you.

This might be what AI fiction is for. Not the epic that demands everything from you, but the ambient literature that accompanies life as it's actually lived.

The Voice You Don't Hear

One more thing. When you read silently, you hear a voice. Your internal narrator. This voice has qualities, though you rarely notice them. It's not quite your speaking voice. It's not quite neutral either. It's shaped by how you feel, what you expect, what kind of text you think you're reading.

Knowing a text is AI-drafted changes that internal voice. You might read more skeptically, waiting for the seams to show. You might read more generously, surprised when the prose works. Either way, the knowledge of origin shapes the experience. This is worth examining.

The audiobook narrator overrides this. Their voice replaces your internal narrator. You no longer read skeptically or generously. You just listen. The AI-drafted origin recedes. What remains is a voice telling stories.

Some people will call this a trick. The narrator is "hiding" the artificial origin, making you forget you're hearing AI text. But you could also call it liberation. You're freed from the anxiety of origin and allowed to just experience the work.

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I listened to PAYLOAD while walking along a river. The stories about office emails and parking lot decisions mixed with birds and passing cyclists. It felt appropriate. The fiction that watches ordinary life quietly became part of my ordinary life.

Whether that makes it good literature is a separate question. But it makes it something: fiction that occupies space in your day, that keeps you company, that adds a layer of narrative to the unremarkable hours.

AI fiction might be best experienced this way. Not as a monument to human creativity but as a companion. Not demanding your full attention but happy to share whatever attention you have.

The voice in your ear, telling stories. It doesn't matter where the words came from. They're here now.