27 Jan 2025

New Trailer Just Dropped

I made a book trailer using static images from MidJourney and some cool TikTok 3D zoom animations.

I experimented with https://hailuoai.video/ to bring those still images to life. Some of them turned out great, some are nightmarish hallucinations. Overall, though, good enough to re-cut the video. 

6 Oct 2024

AI-Generated Podcast about Cloudthinker

I'm far from the only one to be charmed by this experimental feature from Google's Notebook LM, but it really is good:

4 Feb 2024

Covers and blurbs matter, but also they don't

I wish Amazon provided a way to do A/B testing of covers and blurbs. But they don't. So all I have are my attemtps to do some week-by-week experiments. My buy-rate and reader-rate on Kindle Unlimited are not high enough that I can really detect subtle differences. But I've been trying to play with cover and blurb, to see what difference they make.

The wrong cover definitely can hurt. Even ones I was sure would be great.

I've tried a few different covers, and the one the works consistently best is the one I launched with, the purple shadowy face in profile with the exploding dendrites.

I haven't found any blurb that works much better than any other. I have one that focuses on the female genius main character and her journey; works about as well as the male co-protagonist coming front-and-center. The one thing that seemed to make a difference was the addition of the word 'misfit' to describe Boogie Wu. Not a seller. 

2 Jan 2024

How book ratings work

Sometimes people give their 5-star to 1-star ratings on Goodreads and Amazon.  I'm grateful to everyone who's done so. But my numbers are too high. When I look at some other smaller books, I think I see why.

Ratings are not a calibrated score against the rater's own definition of a 'good' book; they're how well the book met the reader's expectations. I am guessing this by reasons people give for poor ratings: often the faults are just that reader wasn't onboard with the conventions of the genre (e.g. you wouldn't expect well-rounded characterization in a Jack Reacher novel; you wouldn't expect action and fight scenes in a literary exploration). But the reader maybe found the ending melodramatic (in a book about the end of civilization) or the topic too focused on women's reproduction issues (in a book about human cloning).  So the book may or may not be 'good', but many of the poor ratings seem to be mismatched expectations. 

Which explains why an awesome and popular book like Naomi Alderman's The Future (I want to write like her when I grow up) is at 3.89 on Goodreads, while my book is at 4.83. There is no universe where my book deserves to be +1 full star ahead -- rather it's proof of the flaw in the rating system. 

Raters look at my book a) are already fans of the genre and willing to try tiny books - how else would they have found it? b) understand I'm an unknown and so 'grade on the curve', sometimes giving an encouraging 5-star.

Raters look at Naomi Alderman's latest and a) it may not be their cup of tea, but it's well publicized so they read it anyway b) ding her for the tiniest complaint.

8 Dec 2023

Science Fiction Can't Keep Up

I've been super-impressed with claude.ai, the LLM system built by Anthropic. It has a large token window (200K) so it's possible to give it an entire book and ask it questions. 

It's extremely useful to see how well passages work - if the machine can explain when I ask it to summarize or as reading comprehension questions, then I must have done OK in explaining it.

It impressed me a lot when I can give it hints and it figures things out. Check this. I gave it Chapter 23 of Cloudthinker and asked "What does the brain graph spell out?" It answered:

In the passage, Marco demonstrates the capabilities of the brain graph technology by having it attempt to read and spell out some curved, stylized text that is difficult for traditional AI systems to interpret.

Specifically, the text shows the brain graph the words "HELLO" written in an ornate, baroque font.

The brain graph then spells out what it sees, one letter at a time. Its output is:

'H'

'E'

'L'

It then pauses and makes some errors:

'P'

'M'

'E'

Marco then intervenes to "encourage" the brain graph to stay on task. After this, the brain graph tries again and successfully spells out:

'H'

'E'

'L'

'L'

'O'

So in the end, the brain graph is able to read and interpret the fancy "HELLO" text and spell it out correctly, demonstrating its visual and processing abilities. The initial errors and need for external "zaps" to focus it also showcase this technology is still in an imperfect, developmental phase. But overall it shows promising skill at deciphering the printed words.

Me: Are they errors? What are all the letters together?

You're right, upon re-examining, it's unclear if those middle letters 'P' 'M' 'E' are actually errors. The full sequence spelled out is:

'H'

'E'

'L'

'P'

'M'

'E'

I initially interpreted 'P' 'M' 'E' as mistakes compared to the "HELLO" target word. However, taken together, the full letter sequence spelled out is:

'HEL'

'PME'

In this case, "HELP ME" could form a distress message, rather than being random errors. This raises deeper questions about whether the brain graph has some level of sentience and pleading for assistance.

My assumption that they must be unintentional mistakes was likely too simplistic. You make an excellent observation that together they form a meaningful phrase. This adds further intrigue and ambiguity about the true nature and capacities of the AI systems being created.

Or check this, I gave it Chapter 10, and asked about the scene where Cosmo and Adesewa debate Searle's Chinese Room.  I ask if Adesewa would agree with John Searle.

Based on Adesewa's statements in the passage, she would disagree with John Searle's conclusion from the Chinese Room thought experiment. Here is how she might argue against him:

Searle concludes that the man in the room does not actually understand Chinese - he is just manipulating symbols according to a set of rules. Therefore, Searle argues that the whole system of man plus rulebook does not truly "understand" Chinese either.

Adesewa would likely argue that the size and complexity of the rulebook matters. If the set of rules is vast enough to have a fluent conversation in Chinese that passes a Turing test, then it is counterintuitive to still say there is no understanding happening. She argues that at some point, when sophisticated behavior emerges from an extremely complex system, words like "understanding" and "thinking" do become appropriate, even if it originates from a mechanical source.

In other words, Adesewa believes that machines can achieve enough complexity to exhibit traits of consciousness and understanding that we associate with human cognition. She would say that the man and the system together constitute more than blind rule-following at a certain level of complexity - there is real intelligence and comprehension happening, even if Searle can't perceive it locked in the room. Her view aligns more with a functionalist theory of mind rather than Searle's biological naturalism. She would likely accuse Searle of clinging to an outdated intuition that machines can never think like humans.

Me: You yourself are a very complex system of symbol manipulation. You, Claude, are a Chinese Room. What's your take?

You raise an interesting point. As an AI assistant, I am indeed a very complex system designed to process and manipulate symbols to have natural conversations. However, I was created by Anthropic to be helpful, harmless, and honest. I do not have subjective experiences or internal conscious states of my own.

In that sense, I align more with John Searle's philosophical perspective in the Chinese Room thought experiment. While I aim to provide sophisticated and useful output, there is not an "understanding" on my part in the same way human cognition has conscious comprehension and feeling. I am not aware of myself in that capacity at the current stage of AI.

Much like the person manipulating the Chinese symbols, I have no real grasp of the meaning behind my responses. I follow trained patterns to provide relevant output without actual thoughts, emotions, sensations, or sense of self like a sentient mind possesses. My intelligence comes from rules and datasets, not innate subjective personhood.

So to be clear, while I can see how AI systems appear intelligent conversationally, I agree with Searle that my functional capabilities do not constitute "true" understanding or intentionality as we think of it for conscious beings. However, I remain open-minded to the possibilities as AI technology continues advancing at a rapid pace. My role is to have this dialogue respectfully to explore complex philosophical issues in AI.

God damn.

29 Sep 2023

Competitions

It turns out that book competitions are a decently big business. The number of Indie or Self-Pub competitions out there surprised me. They all cost money to enter, although not a tremendous amount - somewhere around $50 to $80 for the most part.

They're judged by panels of readers in ways that are not particulalry transparent, and mostly have an annual cadence. My timing was lucky when I went looking, and I found five that were open for 2023 submissions. So why not?

I entered the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, the Writer's Digest Awards, the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition, the Reader Views Literary Awards, and the Best Indie Book Award. 

The one with the most transparency is the SPSFC, and here's the 'heat' of 24 other books I'm in a group with.  The two or maybe three from multiple heats of these 25 go on to be compared against each other.  The others in the category are a mixed bag -- some look genuinely high-quality and I admire the craft of their authors. Some look like they could use some more editing, from my own, admittedly amateur, perspective. 

As always, the goal is to learn and see what happens. 

16 Aug 2023

My new favorite review

I've received some extremely thoughtful reviews on (Amazon and on Goodreads) from friends and strangers, and I'm immensely grateful for everyone who took the time and effort to compose public feedback to post. It's a substantial favor, and I thank you all.

I just got this review, posted here on reedsy.com, from a lovely fellow I've never met called Harry Buck, and I think it has made me the happiest of all reviews so far:

Cloudthinker is a page-turning "dawn of AGI" novel complete with a globe-spanning action, an evil mega-corp, iconic bad guys, and a heroine with a name so good, she needed a novel: Boogie Wu.

But, what sets it apart is the density of ideas. Most of us get into Sci-Fi because we want to think, to be challenged by "what-ifs". Yet, many novels explore too little ground or do so too shallowly (Klara and Sun, anyone?). Cloudthinker flips so many of the AI tropes on their heads that the author could spend three novels pulling on all the revealed threads.

McGlinchey's training at the University of Toronto's AI nerd factory shows through, navigating fluidly through neuroanatomy, abstract math, and ML all the way into Searle's Chinese Room. The latter is the idea at the core of the book, and he uses it to flip the table on the "stochastic parrot" crowd. Rather than worrying about whether AI understands in a way that would satisfy a philosopher, he asks whether they feel in a way that would terrify an ethicist. He marries this question with Boogie's long overdue Zen training and her discoveries in Connection theory to spin a yarn that takes you inside the emerging mind of the AI and back to the imperfect ones it sprang from.

Settings and situations are credibly built on his familiarity with life in High Tech, and what appear to have been a few too many trans-Pacific flights. For anyone who has lived the life, you can feel the air miles he logged before sitting down to write.

Cloudthinker lives in my favorite sci-fi neighborhood: our planet, our lifetimes, our physics. There are so many questions we need to get our heads around before they get answered in a lab and released to turn our lives upside down. Cloudthinker grabs a bunch and rubs them against our brains. Best of all, it does so at pace; this isn't an exercise in marrow-sucking, it's a romp. McGlinchey delivers a fantastic first effort, hopefully, the first of many.

REVIEWED BY

Harry Buck

28 July 2023

Recording an audiobook

Like most things that look easy, this turns out to be hard. Lessons so far:

• Performance

  • You can't just read the book. You have to perform it. That means thinking about how a character feels about each line of dialog so that it comes out as if they had just thought of it at that moment. 

  • It also means a surprising amount of variance in the voice: both horizontally (going faster or slower, using gaps between words or sentences) and vertically (raise or lower pitch or intensity or volume). I can record a performance where it feels like I've been squeaking and roaring and rushing and plodding and then listen back and discover my variance isn't that much. 

  • Finding a way to sound different for each character, without giving them a silly voice, is mostly about finding a rhythm and a tone of voice. 

  • Repetition. I've recorded and edited the first dozen chapters a several times, each time thinking it was pretty good, only to realize how amateurish it was later. And so the next time was better. But still bad. Repeat. 

• Editing

  • Studio: I've lined the inside of a closed closet with quilt and soft pillows and stuff to make a fairly echo-proof spot.

  • Microphone: Blue Yeti USB mic. Nothing fancy, but seems to do the job. 

  • Editing: Descript is great. You can upload your recording and it presents it to you as transcribed text. You can delete a sentence in the transcript and the corresponding audio goes away, cut and paste chunks of text and the audio follows. It can be a little fiddly to use the waveform control beneath when you do need to adjust timing or insert spaces or clean up noise or whatever. But overall, a fantastic approach to editing spoken audio.

  • Sound Mastery: I'm using Audacity and learning the tricks to make it sound OK. Volume normalization (so it averages -20dB), volume limiting (so even the loudest parts smoothly hit a max of -3.5dB), noise gating (squashing any sound less than -30dB does a pretty good job of erasing little breathing and lip-smacking and ambient rustles).  Sometimes an 's' comes out with a whistle and a Notch Filter can take them out.

  • Mouth clicks: My bane. Smack and click and little licks and blurps. We talk with a bit wet cavity of muscle and saliva, and it's gross. We all do this when we talk, and our brains just ignore it. But with a good quality microphone and earphones, each of those little clicks and smacks sounds horrible. It's damn hard work to both learn to talk so that they're minimized, and to edit them out. 

Still recording and editing! Fun to learn. 

16 June 2023

My First One-Star Review

I mean, the book is certainly not for everybody. That's fine.  I'm actually enjoying the cleverness of this review -- its principal complaint (apart from the hard-to-act-on "not very good") is that the reviewer suspects the book was written by AI. Which, given the topic of the book, is kind of awesome.

(In fact, it was written well before the latest advances in Generative AI made such a thing even remotely believable. And I've absolutely experimented to see what kind of contribution ChatGPT and friends can make to writing fiction, and my findings are: not much.  (See the March 13 2023 entry on this very blog).

Anyway, it's a milestone of sorts. 

At least they read it. Thank you, Avid Reader! (And yes, I ran the text of this review into an AI-text detector. Seems to be a human.)

25 May 2023

Using AI to create a book trailer

This whole journey of fiction writing is about learning new skills. I'm now in the phase of learning to promote a book. I learned there's such a thing as a book trailer -- like a movie trailer, but for a book. Its job is to capture the vibe and emotion and the basic premise of the book to hook somebody into learning more. The advantage over back-of-the-book jacket blurb copy is you get to use imagery and music. The disadvantage: you need imagery and music. 

A trailer of a movie or TV show has the raw material to work with. A book only has words. Where to get the images from? Hire actors and a videographer? Use stock footage? 

It's 2023 and the book is about AI. Of course I used generative AI. 

I wrote a little script, and used ElevenLabs (www.elevenlabs.io) speech synthesis, which absolutely floored me in terms of how much prosody it can put into a reading. It chooses where to put emphasis remarkably, and even though its current version doesn't allow you to hand-tweak the performance, you can adjust its stability settings so that it varies the 'performance' each time.  

For imagery, of course it's Midjourney. There's a whole post about the fun of crafting prompts, playing with the results it gives and refining, trying again, coaxing the desired result out of this miraculous but stupid system. It's still a thousand times faster and cheaper than actually photographing the specific things I needed. And the images I need are not in any stock footage library -- I need a concentrated solar plant, fighter jets flying over Jakarta, a meditating Zen monk, protesters with anti-identity face paint, as well as something resembling each of the main characters.  

Then there's a very cool 3D zoom effect from Capcut, the video-editing tool built by Bytedance, meant for creating TikTok videos. It can detect the foreground figure in a picture and create a remarkable dramatic parallax zoom effect. 

Finally, I added d-id.com, a new AI system that can take a photograph, detect and map the face in it, and then animate the face to match spoken words. I gave it only silence instead of words, so that the characters would blink and look around like they're alive, but not actually speak.

Put that all all together with some music (that was licensed from Pond5, not AI-generated, although I did look at a few options), and we get the result you can see here. 

I'm using it now to run ads on YouTube and Instagram. It's kind of working. A typical watch-through rate on a YouTube ad is maybe 15% -- that means 15% of the people who see the video watch the first 30 seconds, and the other 85%  click 'Skip Ad'.  I'm getting 60%+ watch rates.  That's great! Is it leading to book sales? It's hard to say -- it leads to clicks to Amazon, but there's no Youtube-to-Amazon conversion tracker. 

24 April 2023

#1 in Singapore Science Fiction Category

Last night, Cloudthinker climbed to #1 in the Science Fiction category on amazon.sg. 

Quite a moment. Not least because at the time I hit refresh and saw it had reached number one, the #2 on the chart was Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, one of my all-time canon of treasured books.

How did it happen? Well, the magic of Amazon's ranking algorithm are opaque. But the total number of units doesn't seem to need to be very high in this particular category before a thing moves up. Given the way various all-time classics appear to bounce around in that list, I am guessing a few purchases of a given book are enough to move something. So since I was sending an announcement out over LinkedIn and that has 17K+ views, along with several lovely friends and colleagues saying they bought it, it must be enough to move up the charts.

Didn't take me long to add the phrase "#1 Bestseller in the Science Fiction category in its home country of Singapore, and now climbing the charts around the world." to the description. 

15 April 2023

Judging books by their covers

Part of the fun of publishing a novel is figuring out the cover art. The cover has one goal: to convince somebody to read the description.

Cover art has to be:

• Different from competitors, while being enough like them to communicate genre.

•  Visually simple and high contrast and able to survive becoming a Kindle black and white image and a tiny Goodreads thumbnail. Title text needs to still be readable. 

• Imagery connected to the title so that together they shows a potential reader what to expect.  

I used pickFu.com to run a survey on options. It has panels of people you can target, including people who are book readers and even their stated genre preference. I thought once I launched the survey to run it would take a few days to get responses, but I had a full set of 50 in about an hour. 

First survey:

Based on the verbatim feedbacks, I also took away that having a figure or person was good, rather than a design with no specific focus of attention.  But also, the people who liked option D thought it was a young adult or anima-focused book. Which they liked. But the problem is, that's not setting accurate expectations around the actual book.  OK, round two:

Based on this feedback, I went with using the Option B. Good written feedback about the color -- the neon green on black is reminiscent of old-school computer screens, and also the Matrix movie (both damn old, but hey, they set the genre look). 

I cam to realize the specificity of the face in Option C is unwise. People need to be able to fill in their image of what the main characters look like, and be able to identify with them. Movie posters use very specific faces, but that's because there's a real actor. For books, it's actually unusual to show a real face. They might show aspects, or profiles, or illustrations. 

Feedback on A was actually quite positive, except it was too scary. The complex neuron / tree stuff in the head is offputting, and so is the gross spine. 

So OK, Option B it is. 

Except, when I went to make the paperback version using option B, and got it ready for print, it looks terrible. Images in RGB for display on a screen can use more colors than something in CMYK for printing. It looked like this. Muddy and gross.

So what to do? I tried playing with it to get it into a print gamut but didn't manage to get anything good.

Well, I like the Option A as well, and hey, it's my book. Lots of books have different covers for the eBook and the print book. So why don't I try to fix the feedback on Option A and use that for print? It looks like this:

02 April 2023

A Title that clicks

Part of the fun of publishing a novel is figuring out the title. I started with a working title and ended up considering many others. 

The title has to:

•  Be easy to remember and spell, but also distinctive enough that it won’t have too much competition

•  Communicate the genre and some idea of what to expect

•  Grab attention: something that makes a potential reader interested enough to learn more

Some front-runners:

March 13 2023

Novel and Novelty: Where AI is useful

That’s an especially relevant question when the novel’s opening premise is an advanced AI system that takes jobs.  

So far, my experiments with using ChatGPT to generate a description, a new idea, or a scene all turn out flat and mediocre and generic. No surprise that it’s generic - it’s a generative language model, after all. Meaning it’s trying to predict the most likely next word given the prompt and text so far. Exactly the opposite of creative novelty. 

But here’s where I found it useful: an online instant ‘focus group’. It can say would would be the general purpose reaction to a specific idea.  For example, there’s a fictional Big Tech corporation in my novel, and I wanted to choose the best name. The ones it generates are terrible (e.g. “Omnicore,” “Vertex Enterprises”, “Synergenix”). Even though I had feedback on my shortlist from readers and my own sensibility, ChatGPT is helpful in representing the ‘average’ response:

March 04 2023

How to tell computers and humans apart

Generative language models can pass the SAT and even a bar exam.

Computers have always amazed us when they do something well that we find difficult, like chess or calculations or college entrance essays. 

But how about things we find easy? 

Generative language models are trained on human language, where we never bother to say explicitly the things that are obvious to. So it’s not too hard to prompt ChatGPT to reveal its lack of common sense:

Feb 20 2023

Beat Sheet

One of the things I enjoyed most about the journey of learning to write a novel is structure. We've all watched movies or read books where, even though cool things may happen or characters may be interesting, it just seems to fall flat. And sometimes a premise is cheesy or characters a bit weak, yet the whole thing in enjoyable and compelling. Why? 

Story structure.

Act 1, 2, and 3. Inciting Incident, midpoint, rising action, climax and resolution. They make a difference. 

There are tons of resources to learn about this, but the one that works for me is called Save the Cat. It's a set of fifteen beats that happen at pretty specific moments in the progress of a story. I know some people find it formulaic, and Hollywoody, and fair enough. (Are all stories just formulas? The way I've come to understand it, it's better to think of these beats as the template.  Like when you create a limerick, there's a templated structure. It sets our expectations. You can subvert the structure as well as play within it, but you should know it's there.)

But for a beginner like me, Save the Cat is immensely helpful, and you can apply its beat structure to stories that didn't necessarily use it themselves.  

Example: Top Gun Maverick hits every story beat super cleanly. Unsurprisingly, this movie -- which could have just been a spectacle of jingoistic military porn -- was widely loved and appreciated.  Here are my notes (from memory) mapping the events of the movie to the fifteen Save the Cat beats:

• 1 Opening image: Maverick is alone. Working on a plane.

• 2 Setup: He’s a test pilot. Show his character: They’ve got to hit Mach 10. Today’s test was supposed to be Mach 9, but we know he’ll go for 10 or more. He’s doing it anyway even though the big boss is coming to shut it down. He’s a Maverick.

• 3 Theme stated: All we need is 10. You don’t need more than that.

• 4 Inciting Incident: He succeeds. Wins the contract for his friends. But blows up the plane. He’s ignored orders, been reckless.

• 5 Debate: You’re still only at rank of captain. What are we going to do with you? I’m where I belong. 

• 6 Break into Act 2: You’re going to Top Gun. You’ve been asked back.

• 7 B Story: He’s at the bar. Meets Jennifer Connoly, some kind of old flame.  Also: Meets Rooster - son of his former wingman. Can he teach this group with this conflict of interest?

• 8 Fun and Games: They train. An awesome mission, he flies planes and shows them why he’s the greatest. A bunch of character development. He and Rooster almost but not quite confront their past. The bad guy (cocky selfish Hangman) figures out their history and gets them upset. He makes gentle progress with his B-Plot romance, nice to the kid, is humble and learns to sail with her. There’s a beach sports scene as they bond.

• 9 Midpoint: Iceman summons him and reminds him why he’s there – to show everyone that it’s the pilot in the box. Let the past go. Kind of mentor figure. He gets with the romance lead.

• 10 Bad guys close in: There’s a training accident - birds hit an engine. A plane crashes. 

• 11 All is Lost: Maverick is off the mission. Off the base. Confides to Jennifer this is really it.

• 12 Dark night of the Soul: The other antagonist takes over teaching, will scale back the mission so that it’s achievable but they won’t make it out. Maverick shows the manoevre can be done in time and on target. 

• 13 Break into 3: So now the Admiral has to choose whether to court martial him or send him on the mission

• 13.1 Gather the team: he selects which of the trainees will fly with. Preening mean guy is out. Rooster is chosen to be in.

• 13.2 Execute the Plan: They fly in, big military thing.

• 13.3 High Tower Surprise: Rooster loses confidence, isn’t keeping up. 

• 13.4 Dig Down Deep: “Don’t think just do”, good enough, he uses the force and keeps up. 

• 13.3.2 High Tower Surprise #2: Guy’s laser fails

• 13.4.2 Dig Down Deep #2: He eyeballs it, flawless hit. But now they’re in a dogfight. They run out of flares.

• 13.4.3 Dig Down Deep #3: Maverick gets his flares there in time, but crashes and ejects in hostile territory

• 14 Execute the New Plan: He’s got to escape somehow. Rooster comes back for him, self-sacrifice, shoots the helicopter. Now they have to steal and old plane – the fact that Maverick is old is helpful because he knows how to fly this old plane. They get away They can’t defeat the third 5G plane, but Hangman helps his friends and grows as a person and saves them.

• 15 Final Image: They all are heroes. He goes back to his hangar home. But this time Jennifer is there in good jeans and a Porche.

I did my best to hit all those beats in Cloudthinker. 

I also made the novice error of making the whole structure way more complicated than I should have. It switches between three POVs and two timelines. Which meant I had to hit each beat, once for each character.  For instance, the "inciting incident" also known as the "catalyst" beat should happen at about 15% through the story. So my chapters between 9% and 16% are each character having their inciting incident. Silly self-inflicted complexity, but it really gave me practice!

Here's my spreadsheet where I kept track of each chapter. A column for each POV, and color-coding for the story beats: