In The Blink of An Eye: A BBC Between the Covers Book Club Pick

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Recently I wrote a novel under a pseudonym that was 95% AI-generated. I used three different systems to build Death of an Author. The experience showed me two things that I feel have been left out of most discussions of AI art. The first is that the traditional creative virtues – understanding style, knowing what a good sentence and paragraph look like – will be absolutely essential to AI creativity in the future. The second is that the fear of artificial intelligence, the fear that comes from the movies and from the inherently precarious nature of creative work, is blinding a lot of creators to grand possibilities. This story explores what it could be like for the police force to work with AI (artifical intelligence). I loved the thinking of this as lets face it, they are making cars that drive themselves so realistically, things like this could be a possibility at some point in the future. I started reading this morning and ten hours later I’ve finished it! It’s so, SO good – really properly compelling, impossible to put down – I was desperate for the solution to the mystery – but so human and moving and massively thought-provoking on what makes us human’ Laura Marshall As a mum of two young people this was a frightening read in places and I think this was handled with sensitivity. This is is a non spoiler review so I’m not going to say too much about the conclusion other than I enjoyed the tension and the result.

Jo works full-time as a senior strategist, where she has carried out research into the future impact of AI and genomics on the workforce. After losing her husband to cancer in 2019, she started writing ‘In The Blink of An Eye’. She lives with her two children in the Midlands, where she is currently writing the second novel in the series. The great era of the novel is over. You could say the same for film. Every last one of the top 10 grossing films last year were sequels or reboots. The Mill on the Floss of AI art hasn’t been written yet. The Wizard of Oz of AI art hasn’t been filmed yet. AI art is new. The formulas that strangle creativity don’t exist yet. AI art hasn’t been converted into a set of user-driven algorithms. There are no gatekeepers. There are no gates. The garden hasn’t been built yet. We are at the very beginning. The glimpses we see of its possibilities are just glimpses. The introduction of AI into policing is an interesting concept and Callaghan offers both sides – seen through the characters’ lenses but with balance. Kat and her boss are cynical about politicians’ intention to cut resources / officers and replace them with technology not capable of nuance and intuition. Whereas the technology’s creator is distrustful of police for those very ‘human’ reasons.

Everything you could hope for in a thriller: heartbreaking, intelligent, deftly plotted and so original’ FIONA CUMMINS

If creativity is so vital to the human condition, then we must not allow ourselves to drift into a future shaped by what AI is capable of, leaving the role of humans to be defined by default. How do we, as humans, want to live our lives, and how can AI support us to achieve that? For millennia writers and philosophers and artists have grappled with the question of what it means to be human. It’s time to stop asking the question and instead start shaping the answer. Could artificial intelligence therefore offer a fairer and more efficient way forward for 21st-century policing? There are broadly two types of AI: “narrow AI”, which can perform specific tasks such as image recognition, and “general purpose AI”, which makes far more complex judgments and decisions extending across all kinds of domains. General purpose AI relies on deep learning – absorbing huge amounts of data and using it to continually adjust and improve performance, and has the potential to take over more and more of the tasks humans do at work. ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art language processing model that has the ability to write research papers, articles and even poems in a matter of seconds, is the latest example of this to catch the public imagination. Faster, fairer, evidence-based decisions for a fraction of the cost certainly sounds attractive, but early research suggests the need for caution. So called “predictive policing” uses historical information to identify possible future perpetrators and victims, but studies have shown that the source data for this kind of modelling can be riddled with preconceptions, generating, for example, results that categorise people of colour as disproportionately “dangerous” or “lawless”. A 2016 Rand Corporation study concluded that Chicago’s “heat map” of anticipated violent crime failed to reduce gun violence, but led to more arrests in low-income and racially diverse neighbourhoods. The pilot scheme will start with cold cases; people who have disappeared over the years, with no leads. The whole process of choosing which missing persons to concentrate on is complex in itself, and as time moves on, it becomes clear that there's far more to these cases than originally thought. Everything I love in a police procedural but with an imaginative and fresh perspective. Clever and warm, it’s one of the best debuts I’ve read in years’ Jo JakemanI would love to work with AI on a piece of fiction. We could share the royalties, and the AI money could fund more women to get involved in AI research and application. The real problem is not that AI is writing, or will write, or can write. The problem is who is writing the AI programs and designing the algorithms. Who is setting the terms of the research? Who is deciding what matters? Mainly men. That’s a problem because the world is not made up of mainly men. I had theories on where this one was going, but I was so wrong. I’m not giving anything away. It’s a great read. Should a novel place itself in conversation with the canon, with the long history of great novels that came before it? LLMs have absorbed more text – including most of the novels that have ever been written – than any human ever will. Debates about the future impact of AI on fiction are too often led by considerations of supply – what AI might be capable of – rather than demand – what do we, as humans wish to create and consume? The question is not whether AI can replace the role of writers, but the extent to which the consumers and commissioners of fiction are willing to invest in original, human-generated stories. This has to be a strong contender for crime debut of the year - sharp, perceptive writing and a brilliant new take on the detective duo' T. M. Logan