According to The Wall Street Journal, AI has plunged the book publishing industry into utter chaos, with big deals collapsing because no one could be sure who is writing what.
Agents at Europa Content pulled a multimillion-dollar debut deal for Southern Methodist University graduate student Jerry Falade after they said they could not verify that “Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body” was wholly written by him.
“This raises so many questions about authorship and what AI means for this industry. But those are questions for another day,” the agency said
Suspected AI use is detonating one book deal after another, forcing publishers to decide what counts as authorship, what writers owe publishers, and whether the industry can spot machine-made mush before it sells the rights.
Last year, 70 authors including Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen signed an open letter asking publishers to promise they would never release books “that were created by machines.” The Big Five, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group and Macmillan, have mostly avoided grand pledges, which is handy when the same technology might make money and create lawsuits over copyrighted training data.
Falade has denied the claims about his novel and called them racially motivated. “This has just been so terrible for me. I haven’t been able to sleep well, I haven’t been able to eat.”
In March, Hachette Book Group cancelled the US release of author Mia Ballard’s horror novel “Shy Girl” after AI allegations, which Ballard denied, saying an acquaintance had used AI while editing it. Last month, the Atlantic said “Daggermouth,” a self-published dystopian romance bought by Simon & Schuster, contained signs of AI use, but its author denied using generative AI in the writing process.
Simon & Schuster was not keen to toss away a hit because a detector blinked. “We do not believe conclusions about an author’s work should be drawn from AI-detection tools that have been shown to produce false positives. H.M. Wolfe wrote ‘Daggermouth,’ and we stand behind her and her work.”
Stony Brook University professor Tuhin Chakrabarty, whose research cited AI detector Pangram, saw the money problem plainly enough. “There is this bigger angle about the commercial aspect of generative AI fiction, and then do the organisations really care about holding to that standard?” Chakrabarty said.
Pangram is currently being tested by the Blog publisher Substack despite complaints from writers about a large number of false positives. When we tested it, it claimed that a quote from the Bible was generated by AI (which might go a long way to explain all these inspired-by-God claims).
Bookshop.org founder and CEO Andy Hunter reckons the bigger mess is the flood of online slop books.
“Probably 99 per cent of these books are meant to trick customers into buying something that is either plagiarised or filled with misinformation or incredibly thin content that was generated by an LLM,” Hunter said.
The industry’s guardrails look thin. The Authors Guild has introduced a “human authored” certification based on writer attestations, while agents are left to play cop, counsellor and AI detector operator, depending on the day. Triangle House Literary agent Emma Dries said, “I think that agents and editors are now being asked to essentially be police.”
Some agents refuse authors who use AI at all, some do not ask, and others run manuscripts through contested detection software. Association of American Literary Agents president and Serendipity Literary Agency CEO Regina Brooks said, “People are nervous that they’ve worked on a manuscript for a long time and then they may have pulled something from some research and they’re freaking out about whether this would be considered something that wasn’t copyrightable.”
