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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/32702
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Revealing that your characters are AI comes with a great deal of risk. Up to the point of the reveal, (if you have handled the early chapters properly) your readers will relate to your characters, making them more real than just words on a page. The reality of the characters in the minds of your readers is the most valuable treasure that you can hope for during the middle chapters of your story. Later you may wish that your readers get caught up in the climb to the finale. You may pray that they are surprised by your characters victory and that they leave your story with regret that the adventure is over. But during the middle chapters, all you can really hope for is that the readers love your characters and consider them as real as you do.

So revealing to the readers (and your characters) that this is all an illusion in the mind of a master AI and that even these characters are just smaller independent AIs... that is throwing out a lot of treasure. After reading that page, your readers have to wonder how much they can relate to these newly revealed characters.

- Are they mortal or when they are killed can they just be rebooted? 
- Do they age? 
- What happens if they don't eat?

Until those questions and many more are answered, the readers will definitely have trouble imagining themselves in your character's world. A chasm will have been created which must now be bridged.

This wouldn't be true if the readers knew that the characters were artificial right from the start. During the early pages of the story, the reader would learn what it means to be an AI and what boundaries and challenges are waiting out in the artificial world to vex them.

It also wouldn't be a problem if the reveal came near the end of the book, since it might then be a critical part of the climb to climax and the conclusion. Perhaps being artificial opens up opportunities which they didn't know existed throughout much of the book.

But right in the middle, it is a dangerous choice to make. Unless you have a very good reason to make this happen at this stage of the story telling, I would recommend that you reconsider.

One final word on this subject. Is being artificial the biggest twist in the story, or does it set the stage for something greater that you are working up to? If you don't have an answer to that question yet, then I would recommend even more strongly that you refrain from this reveal. When the high point in a book is in the middle, everything after is just cleanup and consequences. Stories should reach for the stars. Ever onward, ever upward.

It is not a bad idea to make all of your characters and even your entire world artificial intelligence constructs. That sounds like a great world to play in, ripe with opportunities for genre fusion and genre twisting. Magic can suddenly appear in your high-tech world; a product of some creative midnight programming. Or a subtle bug in the code might manifest itself within the artificial world in weird and wonderful ways. The opportunities are endless.

But revealing that your characters are artificial and inhumanly different, in the moments just after the reader has learned to love them... I'm not a fan of that strategy.

Original score: 6