Hello Everyone,
We have something special for you all on Book Reviews by a Chick Who Reads Everything today. We have Joan Cohen on today. She is the author of the new book The Deepfake and had a career in sales and marketing at technology companies. You can see my interview with her down below.
Emily: Many books about AI have been mainly nonfiction or speculative fiction. What was the catalyst for writing this book and making it a purely fictional story?
Joan: I’m a novelist. My objective in writing The Deepfake wasn’t to write a story about AI so much as to show that AI is here and a part of our lives. It’s a part of my characters’ lives in ways they don’t expect. To write non-fiction about AI, requires the writer to have considerable technical expertise and be targeting a reader who expects to learn. As for speculative fiction, I have never written it, but no matter how futuristic it is, I think the writer faces the same challenge as any fiction writer faces to create characters and a story that engage the reader.
Emily: You address the ethical, legal, religious, philosophical, political, and cultural issues regarding AI. What made you want to highlight all of these instead of just one or two?
Joan: In my reading, I’ve found articles that address some of the areas you’ve asked about, but it was never my intention in The Deepfake to seek answers to all the questions AI raises. Instead I wanted my characters to wake up to the complexity of those questions. Perhaps my reader will wonder how a self-driving car is making decisions when there are no good alternatives in an impending accident. Do we care that the day is coming when human creativity in art and literature will be surpassed by AI?
Emily: People often tend to think of AI in a negative light. You chose to show how AI can be helpful in solving problems that were previously unsolvable. What makes it beneficial in those situations?
Joan: AI is improving productivity and the accuracy of predictions in many fields including banking, finance and education. The benefits in medicine are already impressive. AI can detect and diagnose disease. It can also help provide superior medical care by freeing doctors from tedious tasks like note-taking during visits so they can spend more time with patients.
Emily: At the same time, many of the characters are fully aware of the dangers like AI-created disinformation. Can you explain more of those dangers? How can we identify them?
Joan: AI-created disinformation worries me the most at this point in time. Anyone who reads a newspaper or watches the news will hear about messages and posts on the internet that show a person, perhaps a political leader or celebrity, saying and doing things they never said or did. Your favorite politician can be portrayed as a degenerate. Revenge porn is an online weapon that victimizes ordinary citizens. Foreign adversaries plant fake stories intended to sway opinions. The government wants to find a way to “watermark” fake images, but hackers will surely find a way around that.
Emily: How is AI already a part of our lives?
Joan: When we use Siri or Alexa, we’re using AI. Our GPSs use AI. The military uses it in drones. There are already refrigerators that will tell you about the expiration dates of food you’re storing or suggest recipes (although not in my kitchen!).
Emily: What compels people to please others? How does that affect women more than men? How can this hold them back professionally?
Joan: Pleasing people is part of our culture. It largely represents a lack of self-confidence. Women in the past occupied largely domestic roles or worked in the helping professions, where people-pleasing was expected. Those expectations can affect pay disparity between men and women, because women don’t always speak up and ask for raises. They’ve typically been the ones interrupting a career to care for a child or an elderly person. Sometimes pay disparity reflects plain old sex discrimination. For younger women, some of this has changed, yet the self-help books on people-pleasing keep coming out.
Emily: A sexual assault occurs in the book, and I admire how you protray it in a such a thoughtful and sensitive manner, especially the consequences that follow. Why was it important to show it in that way?
Joan: The sexual assault is complicated because the protagonist sees it as part of her pattern of people-pleasing, although she’s smart enough to know she shouldn’t feel guilty about being assaulted.
Emily: How do you think AI is going to affect people in the future?
Joan: I can’t predict how AI will affect people in the future because I think it will be in every way imaginable plus ways we can’t imagine. I’m concerned that some people are dismissing it out of hand believing they don’t need to worry about it yet. It’s easy to educate yourself. Just go to Google, which by the way, uses AI algorithms.
Emily: I run the “Adapt Me Podcast,” where a guest and I talk about books that have never been adapted and how we would go about it. Who would you cast as the main characters in a possible adaptation?
Joan: I’d cast Amanda Seyfried as Sylvie and Zac Efron as Rip.
Emily: What are some projects that you are working on now?
Joan: Right now I’m working on a new novel. It’s different from the work I’ve done before and has a lot more politics in it.
Emily: Where can people find you?
Joan: I’m on Facebook as Joan Cohen Author, and my website is joancohenauthor.com.
The Deepfake by Joan Cohen is out now. You can get it wherever you get your books.
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Book Reviews by a Chick Who Reads Everything 