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Sooner or later, it had to happen. A publisher has pulled a novel because the author relied heavily on AI, but nobody in the publishing house spotted the bot.
Shy Girl, a “femgore” horror novel by Mia Ballard, was originally self-published and had many enthusiastic readers. Then Hachette published it in the UK. It was slated for US publication, but that was cancelled after it emerged that up to 78 per cent of the text was AI-generated. The book has now been discontinued in the UK. Ballard has denied using AI to write Shy Girl, but she told The New York Times that someone she asked to edit the book had used it.
AI is getting more and more difficult to detect, and nervous publishers have been expecting a debacle like this for some time. As an editor at one of the “big five” publishers told The Guardian’s Amelia Hill, “If an author is determined to use AI, then cover their tracks, there’s very little we can do.”
It’s not just books that have come under fire. A book reviewer lost his gig with The New York Times because he used AI to write a review – and the program included word-for-word extracts from another review of the book in The Guardian. So the machine was a plagiarist.
While publishers fret, writers are already using AI. Nobody knows how many, but a survey by BookBub heard from more than 1200 authors who were evenly divided on whether they used generative AI. Most who didn’t use it had ethical objections, or didn’t believe it added value to their work. Those who did use it said it helped their creativity and efficiency, and many outsourced marketing and administration tasks to AI.
“We talk about plot, toy with character profiles, work through the structural templates I’ve developed for my own work, read new passages for tonal consistency, and more,” one responder said. “I would never hand over the writing of the work – but having AI as a collaborator greatly increases my productivity.”
Coral Hart, a romance writer based in South Africa, has gone all in for AI in the interests of productivity. Last year she produced more than 200 romances and self-published them on Amazon. Together, they sold about 50,000 copies, which earned her a six-figure income. While Alexandra Alter was interviewing her for The New York Times, an AI program running in the background took her prompts and produced a full novel in 45 minutes.
The romance genre lends itself to AI because it relies on tropes and formulas that readers expect. Hart also runs PlotProse, a course teaching budding romance writers how to use AI. “I do not press a button and generate a book,” she says on her website. “Every character, every emotional beat, every plot twist is directed by me. The warmth readers feel in my books comes from real human experience and real storytelling craft. No tool can replicate that.”
Not everyone in the romance community agrees, however. Readers and writers say romance is a uniquely human experience, and they have no interest in a love story even partly created by a machine. And at the more literary end of the scale, writers insist that no machine will ever be able to replicate the essence of what it is to be human, or rival the work of an original creative mind.
I don’t think we’ll see an AI-generated body of work winning a Nobel Prize for Literature any time soon. But who knows? The technology changes so fast we can’t predict anything with certainty.
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