Review of Your Behavior Will Be Monitored by Justin Feinstein

The promise of an epistolary novel about AI intrigued me. It has been a long time since I read a good, contemporary epistolary novel! Your Behavior Will Be Monitored attempts to tell a unique and moving story about the boundaries between artificial intelligence and personhood. However, I’m not sure Justin Feinstein has said anything new here, and the impersonal nature of much of the “letters” belie the usual warmth found in epistolary novels. I received an eARC from NetGalley and Tachyon in exchange for a review.

Noah is a middle-aged copywriter hired to help train a company’s groundbreaking AI, Quinn. If successful, Quinn will generate personalized commercials for millions of viewers of television. Before that can happen, Noah must teach Quinn how to reach people successfully—how to connect with them on a deeply human level. Yet all is not right at this company, and soon it’s clear Quinn, other AIs, and even the company’s CEO are all operating with ulterior motives.

As mentioned in the introduction, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is told entirely through chat transcripts, emails, and transcripts of video recordings. The challenge with this format in a modern era is that chat transcripts are very different from letters. The brief and terse nature of most chats makes it harder for an author to convey character. Feinstein tries his best, I will credit, but even when he is successful, like in the case of the Noah/Hayley interactions, the result feels very shallow.

However, this format choice does have the interesting consequence of making Quinn’s text-based interactions with Noah and the others have the same weight as every other conversation in the story. So in that sense, I can see the compelling argument for telling the story this way.

As far as that story goes, I can very much see Feinstein’s inspiration on the page. This novel was written prior to the most recent developments with OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., yet it feels extremely topical. Feinstein has his finger on the pulse of corporate shenanigans and the rot that laces our late-stage-capitalist boardrooms.

Yet at a character level, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is uninteresting. What, in particular, was Noah, our main character and ostensible protagonist, supposed to get from this experience? Feinstein tries to create a sympathetic, tortured backstory for Noah. Yet what was actually his moral dilemma in this story? Because at no point do we really see Noah have to make much in the way of a hard choice. Not even during the climax, where everyone seems to think Quinn is going Skynet on their asses, does Noah so much as wrestle with a moral dilemma.

This leads to an underwhelming ending reminiscent of the movie Her. And this is the essential disappointment of this novel, a problem common to a lot of stories about AI: so much of this has been said before. I’m not trying to say I need every story to be completely original; science fiction, like any genre, will be in conversation with itself. But it doesn’t feel like a conversation here. It feels like a remix, yet unlike a truly inspired remix, this one doesn’t make me feel anything.

Competent in its plotting, pacing, and writing, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored lacks anything that resembles real suspense or stakes, and as a result, it neither sizzles nor scintillates. It’s a swing and a miss.