Hello!

In the last newsletter I ran, I asked you all what you’d like to see me write about in 500 Words. The overwhelming favorite was “report on what is real and what is fake on the Internet.” Got it! You’ll see a section below that I’m calling FOOL ME ONCE. (Other favorites you asked for were for me to write more about the creative process and review and recommend books.)

TOP OF MIND

Usually I write cautionary tales about AI, but over the break I was thinking about a good use of machine intelligence, one that we usually take for granted.

If you use an iPhone to take pictures in low light, you have yourself an amazing creative partner. I was taking pictures of my youngest son’s band concert in a dim school auditorium. They came out so well, I wanted to know how the phone did it.

In low light, iPhones have a major hardware assist that is really an old school solution. The phones have large image sensors which allow more light to come in for capture, and they have what are called “fast lenses” with wide apertures which allow more light to hit the sensor. If you were using a film camera, this is how it works as well.

It’s on the software side that things get interesting, however, because when you press the shutter button of your iPhone in low light, you’re taking a lot of pictures at once. Then the phone combines all of those images; an AI processor analyzes them and combines them to make the best looking picture. The latest iPhone’s A-series processor has an AI engine integrated directly into the chip to speed up computational photography.

So there’s your good AI, now for some bad AI. 🤖

FOOL ME ONCE

In the last newsletter, I predicted that celebrity simulations and deepfakes would become more common, but I wasn’t expecting my prediction to come true this week.

A company called Dudesy has released an AI version of a comedy special by George Carlin, who died in 2008. Their AI has created a comedy routine in Carlin’s style based on current events. Carlin’s daughter Kelly reacted: “My dad chose his words so very carefully to express his innovative & brilliant mind. He dedicated his life to it. Now we have this shit.”

I didn’t know that Taylor Swift liked cookware. Specifically, Le Creuset cookware. You can find proof of this in a Tumblr account dedicated to her home, an article in Variety, and a Netflix documentary about her. What you won’t find proof of is her endorsing Le Creuset cookware, yet there are Facebook ads that have her offering free cookware sets to Swifties. But it’s not her at all. It’s a Taylor Swift voice clone that simulates her giving the pitch, combined with some clips of Le Creuset Dutch ovens.

The folks at Mozilla have an app that uses AI to detect fake Amazon and e-bay reviews. It’s called Fakespot. We need this.

Fake reviews are a growing problem not only on Amazon, but on Goodreads, the book recommendation portal that Amazon owns. In a practice called “review bombing,” fake critics flood Goodreads with one-star reviews of books even before they’re published. It happened to Elizabeth Gilbert. The author of Eat, Pray, Love had a new book coming out. Her critics on Goodreads didn’t like that she set the book in Russia and said Gilbert was not sensitive to the struggle of Ukrainians. After being review bombed, Gilbert delayed publication of the book.

MY MIND MAP

After getting notes back from my editor and some early readers, I’m rewriting my second novel, Resist; it’s the sequel to Surrender, which I published last year. My editor suggested that I read Surrender again. Normally, I don’t like reading something I’ve already published. I see too many things that I want to change. I start making notes in the margins. I think about releasing a new edition. But I see my editor’s point now: It’s not just the continuity between the books that has to be right. There are many small things to remember about the world of a book. But there are also big things, thematic movements and sweeping ideas that have to work in a new but related-to-the-first-book way.

It’s kind of a monster. Writing a sequel is hard, much harder than writing a first novel. I realized, after reading Surrender again, that I was being too careful with Resist. Surrender has bold ideas and Resist also needs them.

I will publish Resist later this Spring.

TRY THIS BOOK

I don’t like horror movies. Not a fan of jump-scares, fangs that drip blood, zombies, or anything that comes out of a crypt. I started watching The Shining and never finished it. That was 20 years ago. (Don’t tell me how it turns out.)

The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward is a horror novel with a blurb by Stephen King on the cover. It’s about an abduction, potentially a murder, and it’s chilling, unsettling, and weird. About half way through, the author takes it in a direction that I didn’t expect at all, and her writing is beautifully skilled.

Thanks for reading! See you next time.

Lee

SOURCES

A.I. George Carlin Drops A Comedy Special Real George Carlin Would Despise

No, That’s Not Taylor Swift Peddling Le Creuset Cookware

How Goodreads Reviews Can Tank a Book Before It’s Published — The New York Times