A novelist accused of using AI. Why the literary world still grapples with guardrails

[ownedbycats]

CBC News

The label is nothing if not timely. Weeks ago, the North American publishing industry was rocked when a New York Times story accused horror writer Mia Ballard of using generative artificial intelligence to write her novel Shy Girl.

The Times presented evidence compelling enough for Ballard's publisher, Hachette, to cancel the book's U.S. and U.K. release entirely. Ballard denied using AI to write the novel but said it was possible an editor she'd worked with on the self-published version might have.

The scandal divided the industry. Some accepted the accusation — and Hachette's response — as truth. Others felt the punishment was prejudicial, since AI-detection software like the kind used to evaluate Ballard's writing tends to be imperfect.

The incident, which Ballard says has ruined her career, demonstrates the conundrum that literary professionals face as they comb through every pitch, query letter and manuscript lobbed their way: How do you separate the proverbial wheat from the AI-generated chaff, and what happens if you get it wrong?

"I really would have preferred to see her publisher stand up for her and stand behind the work themselves because they trusted their own process," Degen said. "I mean, the best AI detector in the world — the best detector of bad writing — is a good editorial process."

Later on, they interview the Kobo CEO:

A similar surge of AI-generated writing has put Canadian e-book company Kobo "on the receiving end of a firehose," CEO Michael Tamblyn said during a recent interview.

In addition to selling e-readers, Kobo holds millions of e-book titles in an online library and hosts a self-publishing platform for authors called Kobo Writing Life. It's through this channel that the company is noticing a stark shift.

The company rejected nearly 45 per cent of the books submitted to its self-publishing program in 2025. About 80 per cent were rejected because Kobo suspected they were largely or entirely AI-generated, which would have "barely been a factor" in previous years, according to Tamblyn.

"We are receiving increasing amounts of content that, as far as we can see, is likely being either largely AI-generated, partially AI-generated or entirely AI-generated," Tamblyn explained. "And that's coming in through the same conduit that regular authors are using to get their books out."

Bowker, the leading information agency for the U.S. books industry, recently released data that showed the number of self-published ISBNs for fiction titles rose sharply between 2024 and 2025 — from 306,781 to 477,104 books.

A spokesperson told CBC News it might be reasonable to assume, but not prove, that AI tools made it easier for creators to publish their stories.

Kobo is focused on rooting out the most egregiously AI-generated works from its self-publication platform (like a book that aggregated 10,000 apple pie recipes from across the internet). But it hasn't been easy to develop a broader set of guardrails because the technology can be applied in different ways, Tamblyn acknowledged.

"Do people want to know whether the books are human written or not? And how do you go about that process of flagging or asking authors to certify or asking publishers to certify?" he said. "That is far from being a settled issue right now."

[ownedbycats]

If a moderator can add the "ardrails" to the end of thread title, appreciated. If not just cut where it makes sense.

[DNSB]

Personally, I have no objection to an author using AI as a tool in brainstorming, outlining, continuity, etc. I do object where pretty much the entire book is "created" by the AI which is happening all too often in the current market.

OTOH, AI detection tools are still notoriously bad at detecting AI created content. I still have a bad habit of occasionally submitting content from ebooks I own to those tools just to see what the results are. In my last set of tests using Winston AI, Originality.AI, Grammarly AI Detector and GPTZero, two of them suggested that chapters from 4 books in Andre Norton's Witch World series were the product of AI. I hadn't realized that AI was around prior to 1963! None of the 4 were able to detect AI content with high reliability and the number of false positives was unacceptable for detecting the use of AI by highschool students which was my area of interest in the use of AI.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

If a moderator can add the "ardrails" to the end of thread title, appreciated. If not just cut where it makes sense.

How is this for a title? Novelist accused of using AI. The literary world is grappling with guardrails.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

If a moderator can add the "ardrails" to the end of thread title, appreciated. If not just cut where it makes sense.

I think it makes sense as is, gu is just an alternative spelling of goo, which is similar to slop.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Personally, I have no objection to an author using AI as a tool in brainstorming, outlining, continuity, etc. I do object where pretty much the entire book is "created" by the AI which is happening all too often in the current market.

OTOH, AI detection tools are still notoriously bad at detecting AI created content. I still have a bad habit of occasionally submitting content from ebooks I own to those tools just to see what the results are. In my last set of tests using Winston AI, Originality.AI, Grammarly AI Detector and GPTZero, two of them suggested that chapters from 4 books in Andre Norton's Witch World series were the product of AI. I hadn't realized that AI was around prior to 1963! None of the 4 were able to detect AI content with high reliability and the number of false positives was unacceptable for detecting the use of AI by highschool students which was my area of interest in the use of AI.

AI detector infamously said the Declaration of Independence was generated. Unless it comes out that Founding Fathers were time-traveling robots i don't really pay attention to them.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

How is this for a title? Novelist accused of using AI. The literary world is grappling with guardrails.

I don't think I can edit it asfter replies were made, but a mod can use thhis if title doesn't fit.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

If a moderator can add the "ardrails" to the end of thread title, appreciated. If not just cut where it makes sense.

Did the best I could. Hope it's satisfactory!

[DrNefario]

It's a tough one, and it's only going to get tougher. It's unacceptable to me that the accusation of AI can ruin a career without any real proof. It's an accusation that gets thrown around quite a lot in some indie communities I am familiar with, and it kind of needs to be squashed.

But on the other hand, the industry now has to cope with an even greater flood of lazy soulless garbage, and I don't really want to read that. But is there a line? If the story and characters and setting are all created by a human and AI was merely used to make it readable, would that be OK? I don't know. I don't know if I'd recognise it.

I read a book not long ago that was full of weird non-sequiturs and continuity errors. I wondered if those were signs of AI, but I never voiced that accusation, and I think the book might be too old for that to be feasible.

My problem with AI is not so much with the tools - some of which are probably fine - but with the corporate land-grab. The Enclosure. Don't think for yourself, let our trillion dollar data centres do it for you.

[Gormagon]

Since most literature is in one way or another rather generic (especially if something is published as series) I think it's only logically to use LLMs sooner or later. If someone comes up with a some novel plot, that sells really well, soon more writers will publish something similar to jump on the bandwagon.

If I like reading something it really doesn't matter for me if what I read just follows some generic formula or was written by a LLM, a parrot (the LLM of the bird world), a whale or a loaf of bread.

I really don't see a label like "Human Authored" as a sign of quality. There are so many badly written books by human authors.
Besides..."Human Authored"? Why not "human written" or "written by human(s)"?

Wiktionary defines "to author" as:

(chiefly US, sometimes proscribed) To create a work as its author.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/author#English

Well, a person who uses a LLM to create e.g. a novel still authors this LLM-created work, but may not have written a single sentence by him/herself.

Interesting is the definition of thesaurus.com of "to author":

VERB
to write computer programs
Synonyms
STRONGEST
code program write

https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/author

Is creating some prompts while using a LLM already considered writing a computer program these days? If so, it's "authoring" and since a human wrote these prompts it's all "human authored".
English isn't my native tongue but I think using the label "Human Authored" is really stupid since it's ambiguous.

The covers of books in recent years look very generic as well. If there's a book that's sells very well, soon more books covers will look more or less the same. There are books I wouldn't touch based on their cover.

[DiapDealer]

Bad books are still bad books. Good books are still good books. Meh books are still meh books. Other than that, I really don't care. And I certainly don't have a lot of sympathy for those who have fought tooth and nail to remain the sole gatekeepers of what gets published, now that they have to face some difficulty in that regard.

[danicca]

Originally Posted by DrNefario

It's a tough one, and it's only going to get tougher. It's unacceptable to me that the accusation of AI can ruin a career without any real proof.

Yes, that's what is really disturbing, and on top of that, I'm unsure how to prove/disprove if AI is used? Writing is solitary job, so how exactly is author supposed to prove he wrote the book himself without using AI? There are authors who write across genres with different styles and ones who got late into writing. Editing/translating will also impact the work.

[maddz]

Originally Posted by danicca

Editing/translating will also impact the work.

Which publisher is replacing human translators with AI translations? Does that make the translation AI?

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by maddz

Which publisher is replacing human translators with AI translations? Does that make the translation AI?

HarperCollins, one of the big five.

[nana77]

Originally Posted by Gormagon

Since most literature is in one way or another rather generic (especially if something is published as series) I think it's only logically to use LLMs sooner or later. If someone comes up with a some novel plot, that sells really well, soon more writers will publish something similar to jump on the bandwagon.

If I like reading something it really doesn't matter for me if what I read just follows some generic formula or was written by a LLM, a parrot (the LLM of the bird world), a whale or a loaf of bread.

I really don't see a label like "Human Authored" as a sign of quality. There are so many badly written books by human authors.
Besides..."Human Authored"? Why not "human written" or "written by human(s)"?

Wiktionary defines "to author" as:


Well, a person who uses a LLM to create e.g. a novel still authors this LLM-created work, but may not have written a single sentence by him/herself.

Interesting is the definition of thesaurus.com of "to author":


Is creating some prompts while using a LLM already considered writing a computer program these days? If so, it's "authoring" and since a human wrote these prompts it's all "human authored".
English isn't my native tongue but I think using the label "Human Authored" is really stupid since it's ambiguous.

The covers of books in recent years look very generic as well. If there's a book that's sells very well, soon more books covers will look more or less the same. There are books I wouldn't touch based on their cover.

Imho there is a line between copying, and making an appreciation to another author.
Severeal years ago there has been many of those "appreciations", e.g. in SF there were themes that would have become common, or machines that one "build" on a novel, and lately others "copied" by including them on their stories. That happened also into the music.
That's certainly - imho - an human interpretation, of a work started by someone else, olso often it was really an appreciation to that, but that ofc is something made within a counsciousness. Otherwhise I don't know how that wouldn't be just business.
As a consumer I won't point fingers at all, I'd just won't buy if not enhanched by.