Ocean as Playground, AI as Unreliable Narrator
December 10, 2025
By Derek DiMatteo
While Richard Powers’ 2018 novel Overstory was written around trees and life on land, his 2024 novel Playground turns readers’ attention toward life Earth’s grand oceans. Considering that oceans cover approximately 71% of Earth’s surface, we humans ought to attend more carefully to its health and inhabitants, and Playground certainly encourages us to do so. At the same time, the novel also asks readers to consider the role of AI in society and challenges readers to consider the ethics of decisions that affect ocean life.
The novel alternates between first-person narration by tech mogul Todd Keane, and third-person narration about other main characters that heavily influenced him, including marine biologist Evie Beaulieu, educator Rafi Young, and artist Ina Aroita, plus various secondary characters. Although their lives are interconnected, their storylines remain largely separate until the end. Both sets of narration are unreliable, with Todd suffering from dementia with Lewy bodies, and the third-person narration being related by an AI named Profunda, which has mixed fact and fiction to create a story that Todd wishes was true. The main plot point centers around the legacy of imperialism and resource extraction suffered by the Pacific islanders of Makatea, and whether the residents (which includes Evie, Rafi, and Ina) will vote to allow another round of both, this time at the hands of a corporation headed by Todd who wishes to use Makatea as the base of a seasteading endeavor. It is the convergence of the characters’ lives on the island of Makatea the enables the novel to focus on the ocean.
The novel’s characters are all drawn to the ocean in one way or another, and they manage to convey to readers the delight and mystery of life under water—especially through Evie’s storyline. Based loosely on real-life marine biologist Dr. Sylvia Earle, Evie’s story begins age 12 when her father asks her to test a prototype scuba diving tank in a pool in Montreal (pp. 51–53). This moment induces in her a deep love for life below the surface, and her enthusiasm for the ocean and its denizens is conveyed to readers through descriptions of her wonder and sentiment every time she goes underwater. Two of the most inspiring moments are her interactions with manta rays, the first when she encounters one that is over 20’ wide, and the second when she risks her life to help untangle a manta ray from a fishing net (pp. 294–95). I found her enthusiasm for the ocean infectious, and it made me look for related nonfiction books—leading me to The Soul of an Octopus (2016) by Sy Montgomery and Fathoms: The World in the Whale (2021) by Rebecca Giggs, as well as making me add My Octopus Teacher to my Netflix list. That the novel led me in those directions is not surprising, given its overall ethos of care for the oceans.
The novel’s characters’ concern for the ocean is perhaps best represented by the moment when one of the children on Makatea, Kimipela, asks the assembled community members a disarmingly simple yet ethically complex question about the proposed seasteading project: “If the creatures of the reef are going to be harmed, shouldn’t they get to vote?” (p. 291). The community members in turn asked Profunda, the AI, which responded that “many kinds of deep intelligence populated the depths surrounding the island” and that other cultures believed that nonhuman “creatures had a divinity and a genius all their own” (p. 291). The assembly was stunned by the complexity of the answer, and although no method for polling sea creatures was proposed, Kimipela voted on their behalf when the time came. The ocean is the playground of its denizens, and humans are merely visitors who must earn the right to play there too. In this way the novel raises the problem of how little humans consider the potential rights of nonhuman beings, a problem that Powers also raised in The Overstory. Powers offers no further elaboration than a summary of Profunda’s response, but I found that to be interesting because of the human turn to AI for ethical opinions.
The role of AI in society is one of the other themes raised by the novel. Profunda was created by the tech mogul Todd, and the novel is revealed to be written by Profunda in response to information fed to it by Todd but shaped by Todd’s regrets and wish fulfillment, thereby resulting in a mixture of fact and fiction that readers cannot tease apart except for a few clues offered by Todd himself. And yet Todd admits to suffering from dementia-induced hallucinations and memory problems, rendering suspect his own lucidity. These aspects of the novel suggest parallels between human dementia and the widely known problem of AI hallucinations seen in versions of generative AI at least through the end of 2025. In other words, the problem is that of an unreliable narrator; however, it also raises the problem of the fallibility and eventual corruption of public memory if people rely upon unreliable AI to provide them with information about the world and about history. AI cannot replace the direct experience and knowledge produced by researchers as modeled by the character Evie or the real-world Dr. Sylvia Earle, and at least for now, the human remains essential.
References and Resources
Brandman, Mariana. “Sylvia Earle.” National Women’s History Museum, 2021. Accessed 15 December 2025. https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/sylvia-earle.
CBS Mornings. “Author Richard Powers on his new book ‘Playground’.” [Video]. YouTube. 28 Sept. 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrAd0AuP_LA.
CrashCourse and PBS Digital Studios. “Non-Human Animals: Crash Course Philosophy #42.” [Video]. YouTube. 16 Jan. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3-BX-jN_Ac.
Gass, Scott. “Just How Big Is the Ocean?” [Video]. Smithsonian. 24 June 2013, https://ocean.si.edu/planet-ocean/seafloor/just-how-big-ocean.
Giggs, Rebecca. Fathoms: The World in the Whale. Simon and Schuster, 2021.
Gruen, Lori and Susana Monsó, “The Moral Status of Animals,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/moral-animal/.
Montgomery, Sy. The Soul of an Octopus. Simon and Schuster, 2016.
One Young World. “Unveiling the importance of our ocean I Dr Sylvia Earle.” [Video]. YouTube. 21 June 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhYikpVh4I8.
Powers, Richard. Playground. W. W. Norton & Company, 2024.
Powers, Richard. The Overstory. W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.
Thorsby, Mark. “Kant: Indirect Duties to Nonhumans.” [Video]. YouTube. 8 Sept. 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et7G5lCdLxM.