The line of inquiry pursued in this study concerns how contemporary fiction of artificial intelligence exposes the ethical limits of posthuman relationality by distinguishing relational embeddedness from ethical relation. Through close readings of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019), and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019), the study aims to introduce the concept of “moral overload” to describe the asymmetrical delegation of ethically charged burdens to artificial and hybrid beings. These are the personas expected to provide care, mediation, emotional regulation, loyalty, or moral consistency without receiving reciprocal recognition. Building on relational accounts of moral status while differentiating moral overload from the responsibility gap, the article argues that responsibility in these novels does not disappear but accumulates as delegated ethical labour. The selected texts show that artificial and hybrid beings may be central to human intimacy, service, technological desire, and moral judgment while still being treated as instruments rather than alterities. When we consider the main characters of the novels, such as Klara’s artificial care, Ry Shelley’s instrumentalised hybridity, and Adam’s intolerable moral consistency, each reveals a different form of moral overload. From this point of view, the article contends that contemporary AI fiction reveals not only anxieties about artificial agency but also humanity’s desire to externalise ethical responsibility onto artificial and hybrid others.
