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

Product Information

The revelation of the full villainy involved in the two men’s disappearance is intriguing, but it is Kat – her personality, her relationship with her young son and her experience of loss – that really lifts this novel’ 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. Crime fiction with a speculative twist, In the Blink of an Eye is an impressive debut from British author, Jo Callaghan. I adored Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables, as she was so smart, yet couldn’t stop talking (I was always getting told off for talking too much) and of course, she wanted to be a writer. On TV, I loved Wonder Woman and The Bionic Woman – anything that had super strong women who saved the day!

The author brings the police missing persons investigation to life and I regularly found myself forgetting about my initial worries about AI. The police officers all have personal issues to deal with whilst looking for the missing young people and you can see how personal issues could cloud judgment.

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 A standout debut with a unique and thrilling take on the detective novel. Engaging, exciting and superbly readable. I loved it’ SARAH HILARY Callaghan also uses the investigations to showcase the stark difference that can exist between humanity and intelligence. Between understanding human nature and a dogged pursuit of logic. In the Blink of an Eye is fresh, innovative and very very clever. Flawlessly paced, plotted and researched, it’s laugh out loud, heart-achingly sad and doesn’t have a dull moment. I raced through it. Simply sensational’ M. W. CRAVEN I didn’t know what to think going into this book as I adore Detective thrillers / Police procedurals but I wasn’t so sure about the AI element but I shouldn’t have bothered worrying at all as this was just amazing from beginning to end.

Idő kérdése volt, hogy a mesterséges intelligencia a krimiben is felüsse a fejét. Jo Callaghan történetében egy pilot projektet figyelhetünk meg, amelyben a rendőrök munkáját egy Okos Detektív Asszisztens segíti. Nem is az az ijesztő, hogy ez valakinek eszébe jut, hanem az, hogy ettől igazából annyira nem is állunk már messze. I 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. 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.Some might argue that AI provides the valuable service of customising fiction to each reader’s tastes and specifications. For example, you could tell AI to “serve” you fiction about an enemies-to-lovers arc that takes place in space. But how will you ever find something else to like if you stay entrenched within the loops fed to you by algorithms? And the oddly specific reading preferences – did algorithms have a hand in shaping those tastes in the first place? Crime fiction is full of detectives who have been paired up with someone they don’t like. Few have to get used to a bossy hologram, which is what happens in Jo Callaghan’s entertaining and thought-provoking novel . . . Callaghan grounds her novel in real life, challenging her unusual team to investigate the unsolved disappearances of two students. The moral dilemmas created by artificial intelligence are brilliantly explored in this altogether very human novel’ Sunday Times In the Blink of an Eye by Jo Callaghan will be published in Australia by Simon & Schuster on 10 January 2023.

Pros: A solid 5 stars for creativity, dimensional and diverse characters, insightfulness regarding AI replicating humans (or should humans be replicating AI??), and a well-executed plot with cheeky humour peppered throughout.Kat is a complex character, the author has depicted a grieving widow who is trying her best to get on with life so very well. She's often outspoken, but she is always determined to get to the bottom of issues. This can cause so much tension at times, but it keeps the story flowing very well. 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.

Fresh, innovative and very, very clever. Flawlessly paced, plotted and researched, it's laugh out loud, heart-achingly sad and doesn't have a dull moment. I raced through it. Simply sensational' M. W. Craven 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.The literary realm stands at a precipice. Ghostwritten books raise questions about the genuine origin of stories, challenging our notion of authenticity. Now, with AI’s nascent foray into creative writing, we’re presented with a conundrum: do we hold fast to the irreplaceable nuance of human touch, or do we venture into the unpredictable domain of machine-augmented storytelling? 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 kind of fresh and fearless debut I just adore. Wildly original, heartfelt, funny, and properly thrilling. Take a bow, Jo Callaghan' Chris Whitaker The great thing about AI is that it need not be gendered – why should it be? It has no biological sex. This could be the start of a true non-binary, non race-based, faith-wars-irrelevant world, where we humans could realise how trivial are our divisions and discriminations. At present, AI is a tool. I doubt that will always be the case. An alternative intelligence will make art of all kinds – with us, and without us. I am ready for a different world. The plot is superb! Seeing this team work together with very little to go on it seems like a massive task but it isn’t long before they uncover little snippets of information that lead them down a path which I think any want to be crime solver would struggle to work out. I know I certainly didn’t and I was bowled over by certain revelations. I have no idea if this book is a standalone or the first in a new crime series. I am hoping for the latter as I loved Kat as well as getting to know the team and would be great to see more of them.