IP Picks🔎: A Magical (and True) Houdini Tale
➕ I tackle AI ignominy and two popular YA authors make their adult debuts
Welcome to The Optionist. Thanks for reading along. We’re coming a day early this week because of Memorial Day weekend.
The story about how an AI-generated summer books preview ended up being published in The Chicago Sun-Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and possibly several other newspapers has been everywhere. The reading list certainly looked good on the page and lots of the upcoming titles sure seemed interesting. After all, they included new works from popular authors like Isabel Allende and Percival Everett. The only problem was most of the books on the list didn't exist. In fact, it turned out that its AI author needed some serious human fact-checking. The freelancer who put the package together ultimately came clean, admitting: "I did screw up and it was generated by AI and it's something that I absolutely usually check and verify, but for some reason I didn't this time and I feel incredibly stupid and embarrassed."
I happen to be an AI skeptic, so there’s more than a little schadenfreude here for me. I know a couple of journalists who’ve used AI to help them organize and edit stories. And we’ve all seen articles about how students are using the cutting-edge (but imperfect) tool for their schoolwork. But there have also been plenty of stories about all of the mistakes AI makes and, more importantly, all of the companies that have invested in some form of the technology only to discover that it hasn’t yielded the savings or increases in productivity they thought it would. Of course, here in Hollywood, there's a real concern that AI will take screenwriting and voice over jobs and even exec development jobs from actual flesh-and-blood professionals. However, right now, the only thing we know for sure is that we have no idea how this is all going to play out in the next few years.
As for me, I've been curious about how AI might effect what I do for a living. Especially since one independent producer I spoke with told me that he didn't need a development person (or an Optionist subscription!) to help him with script coverage because he could simply feed a hundred screenplays or books into his computer and use the AI-generated coverage to decide which projects to pursue and which ones to pass on.
I’m still rolling my eyes at that one. And yet it made me wonder if AI could do what I do here each week. Recently, as an experiment, I tried to get AI to help me generate my write-ups after I’d already picked the books I wanted to highlight. It was a total disaster. For every one thing that AI did well — and, yes, there were some passable sections — it did two or three things completely wrong. Its results were either unclear, incomplete or full of incorrect information. By the time I’d fact-checked and rewritten just one entry, it was clear that it would have taken me the same amount of time to do it from scratch. And with that, the experiment was over.
Part of AI's problem, at least with regard to The Optionist, is that there isn’t a lot of information available online for the books I write about because they haven’t been published yet. The phony summer-preview is just further proof of how easily mistakes can happen if you ask AI for, say, a general list of thrillers coming out in the next six months. Not only would that list be woefully incomplete (publishing schedules are fluid), but with the technology as it is now, you’re better off doing the work yourself. As for scouting movie and TV projects, it’s obvious that AI can only give you what you think you're looking for. What it can't give you is the book you didn't know you're looking for.
There's an old trick I learned in grad school back when you actually went into the stacks to find a library book. The trick was to always look at the books near the one you were retrieving. Not just the ones on either side of your book, but a row or two above and below. Inevitably, you'd stumble onto something you weren’t aware of — something you weren't looking for — but that ended up being invaluable to the task at hand. I can't tell you how many times I've found a great Optionist pick that way. AI might save some people some time here or there, but what it closes you off from is that sense of random discovery. Of serendipity. AI limits your imagination. And, ultimately, that's what creativity is all about.
On to this week’s picks! Even though this weekend marks the official start of Summer Beach Read season, The Optionist has mostly turned its attention to fall books. That said, we’ve still managed to come up with a couple of summer titles to recommend too.
🔒 This Week: Houdini’s Final Fight, One Wild Diplomat
🧳 The WWII hotel drama with a magical twist and high-end adaptation potential (paging The Crown fans…)
🕵️♀️ A forensic thriller with Mare of Easttown grit — and a lead role built for an Emmy
🎩 Houdini vs. fake psychics: A prestige historical drama hiding in plain sight
🤘 A heavy metal legend in Finland — and yes, it should be a sitcom
🧬 What two YA authors are doing in the adult thriller space — and why it’s perfect for development
📚 Plus: The domestic thriller full of red flags, gaslighting, and a yacht-load of streaming potential
BOOKS I LIKE (current)
Drama/Magical Realism
