The Character is the New Story

Yesterday, online audiobook store Audible announced three new AI-powered features. One of them, Interactive Story, allows listeners to have a real-time conversation with a character from a book. The first speaking partner is Renfield, Count Dracula’s tormented, insect-eating servant in Bram Stoker’s famous gothic novel. It’s being introduced in limited beta in the US and UK.¹

Rather than its sole universe, the novel becomes the character’s point of origin.

The timing is interesting – only yesterday, we were looking at AI being used to make Greta Garbo, a real actress who died in 1990, perform again.² Audible is doing something stranger. Renfield never existed as a historical person, but he’s existed in the minds of readers since Stoker created him in 1897.³ And now a 19th-century character can exist in our time.

Audible describes Interactive Story as a bonus experience beyond the original narrative. Renfield speaks first, gives the listener a role, a goal, and some stakes, and then responds to whatever the listener says. The creators define the character, opening scenes, and turning points; the AI generates the conversation within those boundaries.⁴ The product design apparently ensures »the story stays faithful to the creator’s vision all the way through«. One wonders how they got Stoker to weigh in on this.

Reading was never entirely passive. The reader supplies the inner voice, pictures the rooms, hears the characters speak, and fills in what the author leaves unsaid. Listening changes that division of labour, as some of the work is performed for us. And now we’re being asked to speak back. Is that more active because we have to produce something ourselves, or less active because the machine is taking over some of the imaginative work that previously happened inside our heads? It’s too soon to tell.

This strange suspension between reading and conversation has predecessors. As a child, I read Choose Your Own Adventure stories, which asked what I wanted to happen next before having me flip to a new page.⁵ Hypertext asked where you wanted to go.⁶ Fan fiction asked what might happen if you continued the story yourself.⁷ In 2000, Patrick Bateman, Bret Easton Ellis’s fictional serial killer, appeared in a series of emails written in character. But somebody still had to write »Bateman’s« emails.⁸ Generative AI changes that.

The important shift isn’t just that a character can talk, but that the character can now continue to exist outside the original narrative container. This might change the status of the novel. Dracula has traditionally been the story of Dracula, Renfield, and the other characters as Stoker wrote them. But now that Renfield can encounter situations Stoker never imagined, Dracula becomes one particular recorded sequence in the existence of that character. Rather than its sole universe, the novel becomes the character’s point of origin.

Perhaps that suggests a different kind of author. Instead of specifying every action and every line, an author might construct a character, define its history, personality, limits, and desires, build an environment around it, and then see what happens. Writing might begin to resemble designing a game: the author establishes the conditions, and then the character generates the responses.

The consequences could be peculiar. You could ask Jane Eyre what she thinks of something in the news, try to persuade Patrick Bateman not to murder someone, discuss shirts with Gatsby, or put Renfield in a conversation with Sherlock Holmes. Characters could migrate between stories and situations, giving readers individual encounters with characters they collectively recognise. We might no longer all have the same story. We might have the same characters, but different stories about them.

And why stop at audiobooks? Films could allow characters to continue after the credits; fictional characters could become companions; historical figures could become conversational interfaces to the past. Seneca on the bus. Sherlock Holmes over the crossword. Carrie Bradshaw at lunch.

Reading has always involved reconstruction: the reader takes the words on the page and constructs a voice, a world, a character in the imagination. Now that reconstruction can become generative and interactive, with the character responding in return.

The story ends. The character doesn’t.

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