A.I. Is Writing Fiction. Publishers Are Unprepared.
Book publishing has few safeguards in place to prevent the unwitting publication of a novel heavily generated by artificial intelligence.
By Alexandra Alter
For months, speculation has been building online that a buzzy horror novel, “Shy Girl,” was written with the help of A.I. The novel, about a desperate young woman who is held hostage by a man she met online and forced to live as his pet, was self-published in February 2025. The book quickly found an audience among horror fans, and Hachette published it in the United Kingdom last fall and planned to release it in the United States this spring, billing it as “an unapologetic, visceral revenge horror novel.”
Earlier this year, Max Spero, the founder and chief executive of Pangram, an A.I. detection program, heard of the claims about “Shy Girl” and decided to run a test of the full text. Its results indicated that the book was 78 percent A.I. generated. “I’m very confident that this is largely A.I. generated, or very heavily A.I. assisted,” said Spero, who posted his research on X in January.
The Times also analyzed passages from the novel using several A.I. detection tools and found recurring patterns characteristic of A.I. generated text, like gaps in logic, excessive use of melodramatic adjectives and an overreliance on the rule of three...
In response to questions from The New York Times about the A.I. allegations against “Shy Girl,” Hachette told The Times that its imprint Orbit has canceled plans to release the novel in the United States and that Hachette will discontinue its U.K. edition.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/books/ai-fiction-shy-girl.html
This Book Just Became the First to Get Canceled for AI
Allegations of AI-generated text have caused Hachette to scrap the US release of Shy Girl.
By Jason Chun
When Mia Ballard's self-published novel was picked up last June by Hachette Book Group, she probably thought she'd hit the jackpot. Now, she might be wishing she'd never been noticed. Hachette has canceled the US publication of Ballard's novel Shy Girl, following allegations that generative AI was used in its writing...
"My name is ruined for something I didn't even personally do," Ballard wrote on Thursday in an email to the New York Times.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/this-book-just-became-the-first-to-get-canceled-for-ai/