Friend or Foe? Communicating with AI in Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

The paper analyses Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Klara and the Sun in the context of language of communication between Artificial Intelligence and human beings. Klara is a humanoid robot who functions as an Artificial Friend, whose role is to assist children in their daily life. Yet, Klara exceeds human expectations and learns to love the girl she works for. The analysis focuses on the nature of communication in dystopian fiction and the challenges it involves. The author conducts a comparative analysis of newspeak and its equivalences in other dystopian works. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Foucault's theory on power and discourse, or linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity will be employed as sources of methodological background. It will also be pointed out that Ishiguro's AI character resembles language models which currently interact with humans on a daily basis.