This article analyses Martina Clavadetscher's novel Die Erfindung des Ungehorsams (2021), which is not only about artificial humans, but also stages itself as a text produced by a machine. Mathematician Ada Lovelace's vision of a machine that empowers itself through language is realised in an unexpected way: Nested narrative levels lead from Ada in the 18th century to the 20th century, in which the Chinese factory worker Ling programmes a living sex doll that reincarnates in the first narrator Iris. As a phenomenology of itself, the novel reflects on its own artificiality and metatextually generates new semioses in terms of media history and scientific theory. The basic anthropological question of what a human being is is neither answered by the novel nor by the subsequent analysis, but is posed anew and in greater depth.