Last fall, Antonio Bricio, an engineering consultant who lives in Guadalajara, Mexico, finished a draft of his first novel, a science fiction thriller about a government conspiracy to bury the history of humanity’s first contact with alien refugees.
After querying 20 literary agents and getting a string of rejections, he spent several months furiously revising it in hopes of one day landing a publisher.
Now, Bricio worries that the already taxing process of getting a publishing deal as a debut author has become even more fraught. He fears that agents and publishers will avoid taking risks on unknown authors over concerns that they might have written the book using artificial intelligence.
The panic and paranoia over A.I.-generated books exploded last month, when a major publisher, Hachette, decided to cancel the release of a horror novel, “Shy Girl,” by Mia Ballard, in the United States over evidence suggesting that it had been partly produced by A.I. Hachette also pulled the book in the United Kingdom, where it released “Shy Girl” last year after Ballard initially self-published it.
When Bricio learned about the novel’s cancellation on social media, his stomach dropped. He said he does not use A.I. to write, except to occasionally translate a stray word or phrase from his native Spanish into English, in which he is also fluent, using the A.I. translation program DeepL. But he wondered what an A.I. detector would say about his work.
So he paid for a subscription to Originality.ai and uploaded a chapter of his novel. The detector was 100 percent confident that he had used A.I. in some way.
Bricio searched for the phrases that had tripped up the detector, deleted some sentences and reran it. This time, the program said it was 100 percent certain that a human had written it. Eventually, Bricio had a chat conversation with a customer service representative, who told him that if he received results that incorrectly flagged his work as A.I.-generated, he might need a different model of the program.
The back and forth only left Bricio more unsettled. The Originality.ai reports on his draft, which he shared with The Times, showed that adding or deleting even just a few sentences produced wildly different results.
“What if publishers or agents start running these A.I. tools on everybody?” Bricio said. “Everybody is going to walk on eggshells from now on.”
As the publishing industry wrestles with the intrusion of A.I. into nearly every aspect of the business, there seems to be little consensus over what publishers can or should do to regulate how writers use the technology. But many agree that the current state of affairs is untenable.
A growing number of writers face unfounded suspicions of A.I. use. Others use A.I. without disclosing it. Many readers feel confused and wary, not knowing whether the books they’re reading were written by a human or a machine.
Quite a few self-published authors have been called out for obvious A.I. use and pilloried by readers and fellow writers as a result. But the “Shy Girl” controversy could prove to be a turning point for the entire book business.
In the wake of the novel’s cancellation, many readers and authors questioned how a major publishing company failed to catch signs of A.I. writing. Commenters on Goodreads and Reddit had complained for months about what they called obvious evidence of chatbot language. The scandal has prompted some readers to question how much publishing houses vet the work they acquire.
“We’re reaching this era of distrust, with no easy way to prove the veracity of your own writing,” said Andrea Bartz, a thriller writer who was a lead plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit brought by authors against Anthropic, which agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement.
Bartz recently put some of her own writing into Ace, an A.I. checker, and was startled when the program labeled her work as 82 percent A.I.-generated. The program then offered her a solution: “Would you like to humanize your text?”
When Bartz wrote about her experience on Substack, dozens of writers chimed in. “I guess that’s what happens when your books were stolen to program A.I.,” the novelist Rene Denfeld commented, noting that an A.I. detection program had also falsely determined some of her writing to be A.I.-generated.
“It’s got to be a wake-up call for the industry,” said Jane Friedman, a publishing consultant.
Most major publishing houses don’t have clear-cut rules around A.I. use for authors, operating instead on trust and the expectation that writers will be transparent. But with the many ways A.I. is seeping into book creation, from research to editing to composing sentences, there is confusion over which forms of A.I. use cross a line — and a heightened fear that A.I. writing can, and will, steal past professional editors.
When Rachel Louise Atkin, who reviews books on Goodreads, Instagram and TikTok for thousands of followers, first heard about “Shy Girl” on social media, it sounded like a book she would love — a gripping and twisted feminist horror story. She devoured the book in a day and recommended it widely. She said she was shocked to learn that it had been pulled over evidence of A.I. use.
“If I knew for definite that something was written with A.I., I would have avoided it,” she said. “I think we should be able to make the choice if we want to read something that was written with A.I. or not.”
The book influencer Stacy Smith found “Shy Girl” on NetGalley, a site where readers can access books to review ahead of publication, and gave it a five-star review on Goodreads. She, too, was dismayed to learn of the accusations.
“I would read books written with A.I., but I would like to know they were written by A.I.,” she said. “It’s the dishonesty that hurts.”
Authors, meanwhile, often feel threatened from all sides. The ever increasing number of books published each year, including those written with A.I., makes it more difficult for writers to find an audience in a fractured and oversaturated entertainment marketplace. On top of that, authors who steer clear of A.I. now feel pressure to prove their human bona fides — with no great options for doing so short of live-streaming as they type.
Some writers are adding a logo to their books and websites that says “human authored.” The certification, offered by the Authors Guild, allows authors to attest that they wrote their books without using A.I. to generate or substantially shape prose. While the guild does not independently verify authors’ claims, writers may be subject to trademark violation suits if they violate the logo’s terms of use.
A.M. Dunnewin, a self-published author of horror novels, registered for the certification and put the symbol on her website: “I thought, maybe having that certificate could be a safety net, letting people know that it’s my work.”
Sarina Bowen, an author who has self-published some books and released others with major publishers, was accused of using A.I. to create the cover for one of her novels. It was a charge she easily refuted; the novel was published years before generative A.I. went mainstream. But now, she worries about the cover art she sources online — which is a fairly common practice among self-published authors — and whether an artist might have used the technology to produce it.
“I don’t know where we go from here, but that moment when I was accused of having an A.I. cover was really a downer,” she said. “Everyone who publishes books is swimming in this world where we can’t be sure of the origin of our content.”
Readers who picked up “Shy Girl” were among the first to spot signs of A.I. generation in its pages, and they clearly didn’t like it. Some writers said they found that encouraging.
“If they are going to spend money on a book, they want it to come from the author’s brain and heart and not a computer that’s robbed the writer’s brain,” said Laura Taylor Namey, who writes young adult fiction. “I applaud that.”
But others fear that more A.I.-generated books will slip through the cracks. And as technology improves, the telltale signs of chatbot prose might disappear.
“I’m really not looking forward to the day when readers can’t tell the difference,” Bowen said.
Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times.
The post Where Does Publishing’s A.I. Problem Leave Authors and Readers? appeared first on New York Times.
