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Former Georgia State Representative and two-time gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams may be best known as a political activist, but when she’s not ticking off Republicans, she’s writing novels.

Coded Justice, the third book in her Avery Keene series, continues to follow Abrams’ heroine through the insular world of Washington politics, this time bringing her up against a potentially deadly side of artificial intelligence. One of the great draws to this year’s Portland Book Festival, Abrams chatted with the Mercury about her fiction writing and the ways she sees it as an extension of her political service—in particular, she hopes this new work can help audiences learn about artificial intelligence (AI) in a way that is more palatable than waiting for X’s built-in chatbot Grok to go Mecha-Hitler again.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

PORTLAND MERCURY: How do you keep coming up with new adventures for Avery Keene?

STACEY ABRAMS: I try to think about issues that are in the public domain that aren’t getting a lot of attention, or that are getting attention, but people don’t necessarily understand how they work. It’s a really good excuse for doing lots and lots of research, because I’m a nerd. It also helps me think about what communities want to understand—whether it’s biogenetics or how the energy grid works or cryptocurrency. In Coded Justice, it’s artificial intelligence. This is one of those looming conversations that we need to know more about, but we don’t always feel either qualified or entitled to more knowledge,

AI is a constant part of the cultural conversation these days. When you first started exploring a new book, did you kind of immediately know AI was going to be involved?

I knew that the third book was going to transition Avery out of the Supreme Court and into her next phase of life. Thinking about it, AI just kept coming back to me as a question. In my previous books, there’s been a clear villain or an anti-hero. I wanted to grapple with the question of what happens when there’s no clear right or wrong, but there are still important questions and decisions. AI was the perfect foil because it’s a technology. It’s not good or bad. It’s capable of great good, and it is absolutely something that can be used for tremendous problems and to cause harm.

Were you trying to maintain a certain level of neutrality?

Less neutrality and more that I wanted to understand it better. People are not wrong to be concerned about this technology.

For example, there was a recent executive order that forbids the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in AI models, and I want people to understand the consequences of that. It can deprive those populations of the very privilege that AI provides: faster understanding, connecting dots we don’t see, being able to accelerate possibilities. This would disallow communities from having access to that information or even being included in how that research is done. By the same token, we have seen what happens when AI is trained on the wrong models and given bad information, and that is a possibility we need to understand, so we can guard against it.

Ultimately, AI can’t do anything on its own. We have to pay attention to who’s making the tools. That’s really the question Avery confronts in the book. She enters into navigating this extraordinary technology by dealing with a man who’s well-intentioned but who stands to make billions, depending on the choices that he makes and those of his team, who all have their own reasons for how they approach their job. People make the technology, and people decide whether the technology is a tool or a weapon.

So many of the people currently involved with AI—the ones who are creating the guard rails—seem determined to make money despite the risk to the rest of the world.

One of the best ways to disempower a community is to make sure they feel outmatched by the knowledge. That’s part of the reason I wrote this book. I’ve been using this series and my life to tell stories so that the reader feels not just empowered but armed—ready to engage.

I love that Coded Justice has been described as a primer for how the average person can understand AI. It’s giving you a little bit of a thrill, but also I want us to be able to say: Oh, when you mentioned LLM, I now know what that means. The way I wrote Coded Justice, I spent time working with models and doing deep research on what’s actually possible today. I don’t want anyone to have to do all the research I did—although it was fun and interesting and terrifying. You just have to read the book, so you can feel better armed for the next conversation.

So it’s kind of a Mary Poppins approach, a spoonful of sugar helping the medicine go down.

Exactly. Only, you know, there might be car chases.

Mary Poppins needs a few more car chases, if we’re being honest. The first books of yours that I read were romance novels, technically written by Selena Montgomery. What made you decide to start publishing under your own name?

When I first started writing romance, I was also publishing tax policy articles. So when Rules of Engagement came out, so did a piece about the operational dissonance of the unrelated business income tax exemption. As a lawyer, you can write romance under a pseudonym, but you can’t write tax policy under a pseudonym. So Selena Montgomery got to write romance, and Stacey Abrams got to write tax policy. Once people got more comfortable with it, I was able to merge the lanes. And now it’s Stacey Abrams writing as Stacey Abrams.

So can we expect more romance books from you?

Maybe. Right now I am focusing on Avery and building out her world. I just actually penned a deal to do two more Avery Keene novels. Hopefully people will notice Avery has a little bit of a love life, and in Coded Justice, there is competition for her affections. So I love that. I try to meet all of my audiences, wherever I am.

Stacey Abrams appears as part of Portland Book Festival in a special ticketed event at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, Sat Nov 8, $35, tickets at literary-arts.org