Category: Writing Community

By now, I’m pretty sure we all know I hate rage-baiting, and try to avoid getting sucked into bookish online drama. But recently something happened that caught my attention, with good reason — and it’s a topic we all should mull over a bit.

In case you have a rock of peace and sanctuary you like to crawl under when nastiness erupts in social media, I’ll summarize the incident: There was a forthcoming book release, entitled “Shy Girl,” a trad pub reworking of an originally self-pubbed manuscript, by an author called Mia Ballard. The release has since been cancelled, the author’s contract gone, and possibly the careers — of more than a few people — are in question. The cause: Somebody at Hachette Group (the publishing house that had acquired Ballard’s work) determined significant portions of the manuscript was created through generative AI. Because Hachette is one of the few big trad pub companies left giving the impression they really don’t like AI, the release was axed, and so were business dealings with Ballard. On the surface, this could seem like a win for actual human authors.

But. The twist: Ballard claimed the changes made to her book were at the hands of an editor, and that individual was who ran the text through an AI program. The editorial staff of course deny this, and my guess is the court cases for this upheaval are only just beginning.

Here’s why we need to pay attention to the counter-claim: The fact is, many editing teams do use GenAI. In the days right after this matter became headline news, a lot of former and current publishing staff admitted they either were instructed to do so, or they chose to, because it makes their job easier and faster.

Now, before you leap all over the editors, keep in mind: Working for tradpub these days sucks. Pay is bad; hours are long; morale is low. A lot of contracted authors are, in fact, stuck-up jerks who believe their opinions are superior to others’ thoughts, and are a pain in the ass to the person just trying to correct their typos. Teams of ghostwriters are regularly employed for all manner of genres and series, to keep up with the demand for “new and trendy” reading BookTok has created, so there’s a huge amount of work being given to a very few in-house editors. Release schedules, and therefore deadlines, are intense. Editors are tired, and in the last few years, many have either gone to small presses, or left the industry completely (my guess is to herd goats in Nepal, and I can’t really blame them).

I could say a dozen things here that’s been repeated for the past several months, by reviewers and vloggers and just people who like to read; but what it comes down to is this: Money has become the god of publishing, and it’s at the loss of quality. We’re officially in an age where now no one is hiding what drives the actions, and our worst fears about what it means for the integrity of an entire field have been realized.

AI isn’t going to produce books soon; it has been, probably since the start of the pandemic. Supposedly, the internet was going to kill long-form reading; but then we were all told to stay home and avoid going out in public for three to six months; and online book clubs exploded. Books could be delivered to your house in a box; you could read them by yourself but then go on TikTok or Instagram or Goodreads to share your thoughts; it was a good model for the circumstances.

However, the flip side of that was: Many publishing employees were let go, due to several pandemic reasons. Many people passed away, and therefore wouldn’t be returning to the work force. Some found a calling in a new occupation. And a lot of new readers, once travel restrictions were lifted and they had much more choice in how they were spending their free time, actually stopped purchasing books.

Who was still around? The new influencers on social media, who liked that they could spend 20 minutes filming a vlog about the latest Sarah J. Maas novel and get a bunch of views and shares. (But, how many of those views and shares come from bots? That’s another can of very slimy worms.) Anyway, because influencing (across so many industries, let’s not pick on publishing here) has now become an established business in its own right, we are presently stuck with the GenAI machine churning out mega-tons of slop to keep the 1% of “readers” sated.

It’s been coming to this point. What changed with the “Shy Girl” case, though, is that now, many human readers are aware of the truth. Of just how entrenched AI is in publishing. Of how fake a lot of books are anymore. Of the fact a lot of “authors” are groups of ghostwriters assigned a singular pen name by a PR management firm.

And that this has all been happening right under our noses.

AI bots programmed to produce something that passes for a book have been allowed to upload “new releases” to Amazon for years now. Formula-driven genres — murder mysteries and rom-coms, for example — are stupidly easy to copy and paste and slap a slightly adjusted cover on (“Tangerine was the biggest background shade last year, so let’s do cerulean this season”). It’s no coincidence you feel like you’ve read the same story in 10 “different” books in the past 18 months — it’s because you have.

Even self-publishing isn’t free from this plague; there are numerous (and I mean numerous) “indie authors” who don’t in fact create their own worlds and characters; they edit old Wattpad and Tumblr fanfiction and change names and job titles of characters invented by somebody else, and then claim to have “been inspired” by these established series, and cash in for their 15 minutes of fame and, well, cash. So many of the titles people base their fanfiction on aren’t even in the public domain; so this is flat-out plagiarism.

But this shit is also insanely popular right now, so it can be found in digital stores and often getting picked up and re-released by a trad imprint, and retired authors who have already made their millions apparently don’t care, so there are never consequences, and the whole damn, twisted cycle keeps going.

Are there publishers and editors that refuse to use AI? Absolutely. Will they be the last standing bastion against the erosion of standards and preservation of art in the industry?

We don’t know yet. It’s true, and a little scary.

I have a big feeling the rest of this story is totally yet to come. I truly believe “Shy Girl” was just the tip of the iceberg.

I wasn’t going to post this. I’m going to be making some pretty bad assumptions, and some people will probably be mad. And I wanted to make sure I had some sort of evidence, more than just a niggling feeling. But very late last night something broke on social media that really helped confirm my theories, and now I feel this subject is getting out of control, and it’s beyond time to talk about it. So, here we go… Deep breath…

I believe major publishers have been using AI to finish writing authors’ manuscripts for at least the past 5 years.

There, I said it. Luckily for me, I’m a small enough blogger/author/social media presence that I’m not about to be cancelled. And I’m with an independent press that 110% supports authors and artists creating their own work, no AI. And I absolutely write my own stuff (using an encyclopedia and thesaurus hardly counts as stealing or cheating). Anyway, the (quite dangerous) point is, I do firmly believe this is actually happening, and I think it’s already left a major stain on the industry, one whose impact we may only be at the beginning of experiencing.

How did I come to this conclusion? That’s a 3-part thesis.

Part One: Since about 2018, I noticed that the quality of genre fiction was going down. Whether it was the same authors releasing their 20th, or even 30th, novel (either in a series or in total), and bunches of readers saying it all felt the same after book 12 or so; or the hot new names publishing a 450-page tale less than a year after their debut, which many people believe felt rushed; there’s completely been something off in contemporary romances, typical who-dun-its, thrillers, modern fantasy, lots of YA, and even a fair amount of MG chapter books for a while now. And I was far from the only one saying this — just go to Goodreads or review blogs or BookTube and read/listen to some of the negative comments on a handful of the major bestsellers in the last decade, and you’ll see it: Flat characters. Unrealistic dialogue. Ridiculous plot that makes no sense. Story resolution felt forced and not plausible. Book went on about 70 pages too long.

And these things apply to a number of authors, a variety of genres and titles, across more than one (two, three, or even four) publishing years. So you can’t say it was simply an “off” year for the industry. For example, remember when everybody was trying to copy the success of The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner, and many of those series, while unique in premise, did seem to have sacrificed more original characters and settings in favor of hoping to jump on the reality-TV or zombie-inspired dystopia bandwagon. That felt…different to the current climate of publishing.

My niggling began when I read about a hundred times in Goodreads reviews: “It was like the author ran out of ideas, so they copy-and-pasted some random paragraphs from an abandoned draft and called it plot advancement.”

Now, if we’re writers as well as readers, we’re very aware that running out of steam before finishing a project is going to sometimes happen. It doesn’t mean we’re bad writers; it means we’re human, and that our brains might need to recharge in order to put together that really dazzling finale. As I mentioned, I belong to an independent press, and my deadlines are my own; the “top brass” will genuinely understand if I say I’m not ready to publish, for whatever reason, by such-and-such a date. I feel blessed to be in this situation. Many authors are probably not.

Because, as we all know by now, publishing has become much, much less about sharing the art of literature with the world — and much, much more about making money.

And what creates sales? New books. On store shelves. Consistently.

So the pressure to hand in a completed manuscript, in a set amount of time, is, realistically, intense.

And the definition of “completed” means there’s an “The End” printed on one of the last pages of the document.

Not that the plot is cohesive, the characters are fleshed out, their motives sound believable, or that rambling tangents lending nothing to the story have been removed.

And it seems that editors no longer care about these things — as long as a chunk of paper with words on it goes to print by the date whichever publisher has set in stone.

Is this true across the board? No, of course not. In the last several years, I’ve read a few novels where everything felt perfectly trimmed, the characters reminded me of real people, the story flowed, the ending was possibly predictable but definitely satisfying. There are lots of newer authors out there making a name for themselves with works plenty of readers and critics agree are unique and heartfelt. To claim “everybody” in the industry is taking dodgy shortcuts would be wrong.

But I do believe these dodgy shortcuts do exist, and that they’re more widespread than publishers want readers to think.

Part Two: A couple of weeks ago, I watched a YouTube video about how tech bros and advertisers want us to dive into using ChatGPT and such, for everything from brainstorming an outline to writing a script or a short story or even a whole novel. This camp is pushing AI-generated art as the “future” of film and even content creator videos. This discussion isn’t new to those of us who have been following it; this commentary was posted about 12-16 months ago, when this trend was considered a bit more groundbreaking. Anyway, the commentator used an AI platform to help formulate the script for a YouTube video, purely as an experiment, not to advocate choosing this method.

The result of the AI-produced script was that about 70% of it sounded plausible — but then it suddenly veered off course, nearly derailing the entire premise of this hypothetical video, and even the commentator was pretty shocked and a bit disturbed. And before you say YouTubers are half-actor, anyway — that’s also not true, not for every single YT out there. Many of them have a professional demeanor on camera, but their opinions and reactions don’t change based on who’s sponsoring them or the rep they’re hoping to build. And this particular YT, by general rep, falls into that category. So I believed him that he’s not pleased with AI becoming more prevalent. (Especially since about 6-8 weeks ago, he released a new video slamming AI being employed frequently now by social media platforms and influencers and big tech companies.)

So, all of this is leading up to: The abrupt derailment reminded me STRONGLY of most of the recent genre fiction I’ve read, where everything was going well till about the third act, then without warning the story took the weirdest turn, and it all collapsed. And then it all made sense when I saw in the video that the AI site he selected for the experiment happened to include Harper Collins — which is one of the Big 5 publishing houses — as one of their clients.

Let that sink in. Harper. Collins. A publicly acknowledged client of an AI company. That proudly offers services like creative writing.

Combine these findings with my earlier musings, and…it’s not good. It does make the notion that there’s a concrete reason behind all the crappy books lately a lot more solid. But that does not make it easier to swallow. The idea that an author contracted to write a 400-page novel produces 310 pages of tight, concise plot and relatable characters, and feels the story has reached a natural end, would then be forced to somehow come up with 90 additional pages…and maybe an editor suggests a ghostwriter to help…except the “ghostwriter” is an AI tool…which doesn’t have the human eye for plot holes or inconsistent motivations…but there isn’t time to edit it before the deadline, and… All of this is a slight leap, but…it’s also terrifically unsettling, if it’s even the slightest bit true.

This is the sort of practice that leads to the death of artistic integrity. If an author does not actually come up with all of their own book…but their publisher in fact encouraged them to use tools that have been accused of stealing copyrighted material from, among other sources, previously published titles… YIKES. Yikes, yikes, yikes.

Part Three: This is the aforementioned late-breaking. NaNoWriMo, which runs National Novel Writing Month (for those of you who aren’t familiar with the abbreviation), has taken massive fire recently for a staff scandal involving inappropriate and illegal conduct with minors. Most of us who formerly participated in NaNoWriMo’s events have stopped doing so. Early this morning there was a new viral post in my social media feed — NaNoWriMo is in the headlines again, for endorsing their participants to use AI.

Yes, endorsing! Not just looking the other way, but actively giving their blessing! To possibly steal from other artists! And then win a certification for it by reaching 50,000 words in 12 hours or some bullshit!

This is DISGUSTING. There are SO many of us who poured all we had into creating OUR OWN 50,000 words in 30 days — or 20! — or even less!! — working around full-time jobs, misbehaving kids, upcoming holidays, the first cold of the season, relying on OUR IMAGINATIONS and too much coffee and the cheers of our friends. The official statement from NaNoWriMo claims encouraging AI will help writers who are pressed for time, who might be disabled, who may not be in the best financial circumstances. That’s just horseshit. I have a learning disorder, I’m chronically ill, my bank account is in terrible shape, I certainly don’t have zillions of hours without other responsibilities, AND YET I MANAGED TO WIN NANO TWICE. AI won’t automatically level the playing field. Nor should it! This kind of event is meant to be a challenge!

Here’s how all of this ties into cementing my theory: Many prominent authors have been proponents of NaNoWriMo for years. What if some of them also belong to the publishers who might be — who are? — using AI behind the scenes of their own operations? Doesn’t this indicate a mutual interest? Involving corporate sponsorship?

Jeez louise on a freaking cracker. I really hesitate to say I’ve uncovered some sort of grand conspiracy. BUT.

It. Isn’t. Looking. Good.

I don’t even know how we fight this thing. Only buy indie or small press titles? Boycott the Big 5? But wouldn’t that hurt plenty of hardworking authors who’d never dream of plugging their draft into an AI app? And, unfortunately, there are lots of self-published personas who have, in fact, “created” all their books via AI.

We’re only now finding out that this has actually been going on for at least several years. It’s how some “authors” who produced dozens of titles in a matter of months got caught. If the Big 5 have been into this since, I don’t know, 2015 or something…that calls a HUGE amount of publications into question, and that’s intimidating, and horrifically unnerving for those of us who just like to read original fiction.

But how do we go up against major corporations with tons and tons of money? Could we make them stop just by asking nicely? What about authors who may have known their editors extended their works by AI, but were/are afraid to speak up because it might mean the end of their careers? AAARRGGHH.

I don’t have answers. I have no clue what happens next.

I’m just praying whatever it is will lead us to a way out of this mess.