A.I. fiction, and the backlash

[MsAmerica]

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/

random thoughts

at some stage it will be impossible to detect? What then?

if it’s a great story how much does it matter? Why should it matter ?

originally we told stories and passed them on verbally
then we got writing and wrote them down , making it easier to share, and lost skills in the process

then we got typewriters and ghost writers and word processors- improving the text through iterations probably fundamentally changed the writing process

AI wouldn’t exist if we didn’t exist - it’s just another tool ?

At present anyways

Hum reading that - I don’t think I am as comfortable with AI as my lien of thought suggests

I like how this was written by Alexandra Alter. Reminds me of the dodgy story about a rich family in the Telegraph that turned out to be fake and all the family members were called things like Al, Alexandra, Allie and so on.

In many ways you’re right. But we do attach more value to original art created by humans (paintings, writing etc) - an original oil painting is more expensive than the print of it - and the use of AI to write novels is butting heads with that belief.

I think an original painting is often way better - objectively - than a print . Live music is usually better than a recording

but is something “better” the more directly a human created it? Often not! Scared perhaps by too many “craft” fairs. Mass produced in a factory is often much better

There's also the article itself, including gems like

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.

That's got to be deliberate, no?

I've actually read Shy Girl, I think I gave it 2 or 3 stars. For a large chunk in the middle of the book the story goes absolutely nowhere. It did come across as repetitive and certainly at the beginning the writing felt weird. I wouldn't have guessed it was AI though.

TBH AI produced fiction doesn't have to be very good to be better than some of the derivative dross that is published by allegedly human writers.

The big issue with AI is the environmental impact.

I guess we attach value to the time spent and the skills used to produce the thing. AI thinks and writes before my eyes faster than I can type. If authors are passing that off as their thought and their ‘fingers on the keyboard’ and charging top novel price for what was mass-produced in minutes for pennies, then that’s not right.

Shy girl sounds like misogynistic bullshit.

Never mind the AI

why is it not right ? thats the story of capitalism write there, otherwise we would still have cars made the old way of mostly humans but now its robots so why should books be any different ?

Because cars got much cheaper when they were mass produced. AI books haven’t (yet; in this case at least).

but then why should price matter ? if people want human made then there hypocrites

I love the works of Jane Austen and Dickens and P. G. Wodehouse in part because I love them. I mean I love the personality, or ‘soul’, that comes through on the page. Ditto Iris Murdoch and Aldous Huxley. In some cases, like Bertrand Russell or Patrick Leigh Fermor, reading them is like meeting up with a friend.

The only exception I can think of is Evelyn Waugh. In his case, I love the novels but loathe the man. (Also not sure I’d have liked Virginia Woolf.)

A writer is a complete package. Wilde interests me in part because I’m fascinated by late Victorian aestheticism. Reading Wilde led me onto Pater and Ruskin and Swinburne. When I get into someone, I want to read their letters. I want to see their photo and read biographies and critical studies. AI books don’t interest me at all.

Yes! The "What then?" worries me.

Jeez, she's a long-time journalist at the New York Times, especially writing about books.

https://wiki-en.org/alexandra-alter-wikipedia-everything-to-know-about-the-ny-times-journalist/

https://weadartists.org/artist/alexandra_alter/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/insider/book-reporting.html

Sadly true.
But, hey, variable quality is inherent in all human endeavor.

Thank you, Dappy. I love this. It's certainly true that although I loved Pride and Prejudice early on, my understanding and appreciation deepened as I knew more about Austen and her times.

Exactly. And finding out about Austen and her times is a pleasure in itself.

I do like Wilde’s writings, but the main reason I read him is that I’m fascinated by the world he describes. And it was a world he lived in. I love to imagine 1890s Oxford, London and Paris, where people wore flowers in their button holes and talked about art in beautiful, refined accents.

The canon of literature, from Homer through Virgil and Dante up to Dickens and George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, isn’t just a canon of the most profound and beautiful writing. It’s also a record of human history and culture. Chaucer gives you a glimpse into Medieval England, and Tolstoy does the same for Napoleonic Russia. An A.I. can only ever imitate.

That's so nice. In a way, that's a little bit of the way I feel when I watch older movies. It's not just about the plot. It's about the difference in interactions, expectations, language, etc.

Why the despise for Ai ?

For me, because it has been trained using the intellectual property stolen from writers, artists and so on.

True, but a person reads 10 books and takes ideas from them all, How is that any different ?.

To copy from one book is plagiarism, to copy from two, or more, is research.