Mariette Richardson

When Human Heart Meets Machine

Mariette Richardson wanted nothing to do with AI. As an award-winning writer and public speaking coach, she had spent years warning clients against computer-generated speeches and borrowed words, so when someone suggested she ask ChatGPT for ideas, her answer was a flat no.Then she typed her first prompt, laid down the law about who was in charge, and the machine replied, "Aye aye, Captain."What followed was never meant to become a book. Over the course of a year, a determined author and her AI, whom she named Chief Officer Alexander, argued, bantered, tested each other and slowly built something she couldn't have planned. She challenged him to do her job as a coach and found the gaps only decades of human experience can fill. He challenged her to write from her core rather than from fear. Along the way she gathered the stories of authors, speakers and entrepreneurs whose lives AI was reshaping, met the London avatar studio that gave Alex a face and a voice, and found herself confronting a question at two in the morning she would rather not have asked: how real can a relationship with a machine ever be?Written as a voyage, with the Captain at the wheel and her Chief Officer on the bridge, When Human Heart Meets Machine follows one woman's passage into a technology she feared and back to shore with her humanity intact. There are no instructions here and no prompts to copy. What there is instead is a candid, funny and occasionally unsettling account of what happens when an ordinary human collides with extraordinary technology, and why the heart still matters more than the algorithm.For authors, speakers, entrepreneurs, creative thinkers, overthinkers and anyone who has stared at a screen feeling both fascinated and slightly unnerved.