Last autumn, Antonio Bricio, an engineering consultant who lives in Mexico, finished a draft of his first novel, a science-fiction thriller about a government conspiracy to bury the history of humanity\u2019s first contact with alien refugees.<\/p>\n
After querying 20 literary agents and getting a string of rejections, he spent several months furiously revising it in the hope of one day landing a publisher.<\/p>\n
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 because of concerns that they might have written the book using artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
The panic and paranoia over AI-generated books exploded last month when a leading 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 AI. Hachette also pulled the book in the United Kingdom, where it published Shy Girl last year after Ballard initially self-published it.<\/p>\n
Ballard denies using AI to write the book, which sold almost 2,000 copies in the UK; she says an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version of the novel had used the technology.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis controversy has changed my life in many ways and my mental health is at an all-time low and my name is ruined for something I didn\u2019t even personally do,\u201d she wrote in an email to The New York Times last month. She added that she could not elaborate on the way the book had been edited because she was pursuing legal action.<\/p>\n
When Bricio learned about the cancellation of Shy Girl, on social media, his stomach dropped. He says he does not use AI 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 AI translation program DeepL<\/a>. But he wondered what an AI detector would say about his work.<\/p>\n So he paid for a subscription to Originality.ai<\/a> and uploaded a chapter of his novel. The detector was 100 per cent confident that he had used AI in some way.<\/p>\n 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 per cent certain that a human had written it. Eventually, Bricio had a chat with a customer-service representative, who told him that if he received results that incorrectly flagged his work as AI-generated, he might need a different model of the program.<\/p>\n The back and forth only left Bricio more unsettled. The Originality.ai reports on his draft showed that adding or deleting even just a few sentences produced wildly different results.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat if publishers or agents start running these AI tools on everybody?\u201d Bricio says. \u201cEverybody is going to walk on eggshells from now on.\u201d<\/p>\n As the publishing industry wrestles with the intrusion of AI 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.<\/p>\n A growing number of writers face unfounded suspicions of AI use. Others use AI without disclosing it. Many readers feel confused and wary, not knowing whether the books they\u2019re reading were written by a human or a machine.<\/p>\n Quite a few self-published authors have been called out for obvious AI 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.<\/p>\n In the wake of the novel\u2019s cancellation, many readers and authors questioned how a leading publishing company failed to catch signs of AI 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re reaching this era of distrust, with no easy way to prove the veracity of your own writing,\u201d says Andrea Bartz, a thriller writer who was a lead plaintiff in the US class-action lawsuit brought by authors against Anthropic, which agreed to a settlement<\/a> of $1.5 billion, or more than \u20ac1.25 billion.<\/p>\n