Sock Puppets (en Inglés) - Eveyln Vale

In 2011, the Pentagon built software to run fake people online - hundreds of fabricated personas, each with a face, a history, and a native voice. Sock Puppets begins there, with the record, and asks the only question that still matters: what happens when the machines take over the job?

When a system called CIVNET begins shaping what entire populations believe - not by lying, but by arranging what they see until a chosen conclusion feels like their own idea - three women with intelligence-community backgrounds are pulled into a race to understand it before it becomes invisible. What they uncover isn’t a weapon. It’s an infrastructure: manufactured consensus at planetary scale, with no one left who can switch it off.

A grounded, propulsive techno-thriller, Sock Puppets dramatizes the seven central problems of AI ethics - alignment, emergence, optimization, persuasion, and more - through people forced to make irreversible decisions under pressure. Each chapter is anchored by an epigraph drawn from twenty-five centuries of thinkers, from Thucydides to Claude Shannon to Václav Havel.

The systems in the novel already exist in early forms. The only question is whether we recognize them.