This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.Book publishing has, let’s say, a complicated relationship with artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, Anthropic settled a lawsuit brought by authors and publishers, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion after training its chatbot, Claude, on pirated text; hundreds of such copyright lawsuits against data-scraping tech companies are still making their way through the courts. Many in the culture industries see AI as not just a thief but an existential competitor, ready to replace human writers at every turn. Yet publishers are also fascinated by the technology (and not only because they use it for marketing and other tasks). The major imprints have been churning out a robust collection of books (more than 20 this year, by my count) that explain, extol, deride, fictionalize, and occasionally incorporate AI.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s books section:Is this the end of the dictionary?“In the beginning, there was the word,” a poem by Ashley M. JonesThe most difficult position in sportsAmong these recent releases, one overarching theme is a debate occurring between so-called accelerationists and doomers—those who think superintelligence will hugely benefit humanity and those who suspect it will kill us all. Adam Becker, a journalist and former astrophysicist, disagrees with both groups. Becker, the author of the recent anti-utopian critique More Everything Forever, wrote for The Atlantic this week about his problems with a new dystopian manifesto, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. (The Atlantic, which is also closely covering AI, published an essay about Becker’s book and an excerpt from If Anyone Builds It.)Becker’s main objection to both sides is that they overhype the long-term, world-altering effects of superintelligence while downplaying the “much more immediate and well-founded concerns about the dangers of thoughtlessly deployed technology,” he writes. The kinds of ongoing changes that he would prefer to focus on are well accounted for in 2025’s AI book haul. Readers can find out more about how AI’s processes resemble the workings of our brains (or don’t); how the technology is changing medicine, warfare, education, business, and politics; how it has already profoundly altered society. But to me, the most interesting of the crop (or maybe just the most fun) are the works that explore our individual relationships with AI, through fiction or memoir.Novels such as Amy Shearn’s Animal Instinct and Jayson Greene’s UnWorld imagine chatbots standing in for boyfriends or dead loved ones; politician-author Stacey Abrams invents a rogue medical-AI company in her latest legal thriller, Coded Justice. Hamid Ismailov’s wildly experimental novel We Computers, translated from Uzbek and longlisted for a 2025 National Book Award, creates an alternate history in which a 1980s computer intelligently generates a new kind of mind-expanding, transnational literature. (Patti Smith is a fan; she blurbed it.)Occupying a category all its own is Searches, a fragmented memoir in which Vauhini Vara works through her complex feelings about technology. Vara interweaves the story of the rise of the internet with the narrative of her life and work as a tech reporter. She also includes strange interludes: prose-poetic lists of her Google searches; a collection of her Amazon-purchase reviews; and, most strikingly, a series of long interactions with ChatGPT-3 as she works to revise an essay about a sister who died years ago. As Matteo Wong noted in his Atlantic article about the book, the large language model produced what Vara considered to be the essay’s best lines while also inserting plenty of lies. She wound up employing the bot not to think for her, but to prod her into a different kind of thinking; it forced her, she writes, “to assert my own consciousness by writing against the falsehoods.” I enjoyed the book in part because it was less about what technology is doing to us than what we are doing in response.Illustration by The AtlanticThe Useful Idiots of AI DoomsayingBy Adam BeckerThose who predict that superintelligence will destroy humanity serve the same interests as those who believe that it will solve all of our problems.Read the full article.What to ReadThe Boatbuilder, by Daniel GumbinerGumbiner’s debut novel introduces readers to Berg, a Silicon Valley defector with an opioid addiction who has left his tech-startup gig to apprentice with Alejandro, an eccentric boatbuilder. Alejandro—a chronic hobbyist who also carves Elizabethan lutes and builds portable pasteurizers in a rural Northern California town—teaches Berg the minutiae of boatbuilding, such as how to gauge the moisture content of a piece of wood and how to ready a vessel for its maiden voyage. The work is painstaking, but Berg’s measurable progress lends direction and meaning to his otherwise unsettled existence. Perhaps most importantly, he forges a profound bond with another human being, something missing from his former life. “When was the last time you got lost in a thing?” Alejandro asks Berg at one point. Berg can’t summon an answer. What he seeks, Gumbiner writes, is to learn “how to do things properly,” and as his skill grows, he only becomes “more confident, more connected to the world.” — Sophia StewartFrom our list: Eight books for dabblersOut Next Week📚 The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, by Kiran Desai📚 What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan📚 A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories, by Jonathan LethemYour Weekend ReadBrian Hamill / TriStar Pictures / AlamyRobert Redford Was as Real as It GetsBy K. Austin CollinsOne of the toughest and most crucial jobs for an actor is to convince us that they are thinking—that if we peel back the surface of the actorly persona, we’ll find an actual person, a self arising out of some genuine inner core that colors in the lines and mannerisms of a character and makes them real. Despite his immense fame, Redford, one of the defining American actors of both his and subsequent generations, feels almost undercelebrated in this regard. He had a habit of making the job look too easy, and his nuances were often most apparent in contrast to multiple eras of co-stars—A-list actors like [Dustin] Hoffman, Natalie Wood, Paul Newman, Jane Fonda, and Barbra Streisand, then Meryl Streep, Michelle Pfeiffer, and even a fledgling Andrew Garfield—or the setting, like the expansive wilderness of the 1972 western Jeremiah Johnson. Redford’s talent could seem invisible until the right conditions made it heroically apparent. His craft was not predicated on reminding us, through strain and largesse, of a master at work; his mastery could be found in the fact that we so often seemed to miss it.Read the full article.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight.Explore all of our newsletters.