‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ said Alice. ‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the cat. ‘We’re all mad here.’ Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Do you also feel as if we’ve all tumbled down a rabbit-hole into a strange world where nothing makes sense?
When I was previewing selected themes for my social posts this month, ‘March Madness’ up, but it didn’t resonate with me. This week, however, I feel like the entire world’s caught on, and I’m left scratching my head in bewilderment.
Comics publisher Fantagraphics just announced on their Facebook feed that a ship carrying copies of one of their new publications, an anthology by cartoonist Roberta Gregory, was struck by a missile in the Persian Gulf. I haven’t been able to determine why this particular cargo was in the middle of the current war, since Fantagraphics appears to be a U.S. publisher. The good news is that the ship and its crew made it safely out of there, but the book’s launch has had to be postponed. And to top things off, Fantagraphics has noted that insurance for the shipment doesn’t cover acts of war.
For some reason, the humble little book keeps getting embroiled in contentiousness.
The war on book banning in the U.S. rages on. This week, a library director in Rutherford County, Tennessee, officially refused to comply with her board’s order to move more than 100 books, many with LGBTQ+ content, from “children’s” and “teen” to the adult section because they were deemed “age-inappropriate”, even though they were specifically written for those age groups. It’s seen as a way to censor knowledge of the differences among us. A children’s book author I know told me that she has to jump through all kinds of hoops to get her books approved, so the books in question wouldn’t have made it onto the shelves lightly. The director may lose her job over this, but she’s taken a stand, and has the support of a number of organizations that advocate for free expression and writers’ rights.
In the never-ending saga of the author of The Salt Path, a new controversy has come to light. In 2019, Raynor Winn was awarded the £10,000 Christopher Bland Prize for debut novelists for her breakout novel about walking the coastal path of England after she and her husband Moth lost their home and he was diagnosed with a terminal disease. Having already being outed about the legitimacy of that book and even Wynn’s diagnosis, it’s now come out that she won the £10,000 prize under false pretenses: it wasn’t the first book she’d written. A previous novel had been published under the alias Izzy Wyn-Thomas through a company she and her hubby briefly owned. Read more about the original story in my blog post The salty path of veracity.
Hoaxes and frauds involving books are nothing new at all. There are many notorious instances over several centuries. In the 9th century someone, or more than one person, forged a set of papal and council decrees supposedly collected by Saint Isidore of Sevilla. Called The False Decretals, they were falsifications of church law, in a determined attempt to separate Church and State. Deciding that their end goal would never be achieved legitimately, the forgers came up with the idea of writing fake rulings by long-dead popes and kings. Unlike later forgeries, they were generally accepted as authentic for several centuries and had considerable influence. Even though they were definitively refuted in the 17th century, they’d done their job.
The medieval forgers’ purpose was to foment a revolution in church law, but for more recent writers, I can imagine the motivation: fame, recognition, probably piles of money. It’s something most, if not all, writers would like. We work hard, put ourselves out there on the printed page, and hope for some validation. But what if that validation isn’t earned?
In 1970, novelist Clifford Irving decided to create a bogus ‘autobiography’ of eccentric business magnate Howard Hughes. Ironically, Irving had written a biography of a Hungarian art forger named Elmyr de Hory in 1969. Perhaps he drew inspiration from de Hory’s story, because he proceeded to do some forging of his own. Irving claimed that he and Hughes had been corresponding by mail, and proffered Hughes ‘hand-written’ notes. He received a $765,000 advance from publisher McGraw-Hill, Inc., and hoped to slide the book under recluse Hughes’ radar. However, Hughes eventually did come forward, quite publicly. Irving went on to serve 17 months in prison for fraud. His story was featured in Orson Welles’s final film F for Fake!
James Frey published a searing ‘memoir’ in 2003 of his struggles with alcohol and drug addiction called A Million Little Pieces. It went on to become a huge bestseller just two years later when Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club. But the following year everything collapsed like a house of cards, after much of it was exposed as balderdash. It was a massive literary scandal.
Readers expect that what they read, especially if it’s a memoir, but even with fiction novels, is authentic/authentically written. And now we come to a story that’s been breaking all over the place: a novel partially produced by AI. It’s a sad tale, and I’m not sure why it’s being blasted around so much, but it’s a cautionary tale on all sides.
In 2025, indie author Mia Ballard self-published her novel “Shy Girl,” a ‘femgore’ (a very popular subgenre these days) revenge story of a young woman who’s held hostage by a man she met online and forced to live as his pet before she begins to release her rage. The book was a hit, and achieved every writer’s dream: it was picked up by a major publisher, Hachette in the U.K.
But problems soon arose. I haven’t read the book – in fact I wasn’t aware of it at all until it began popping up in my literary news feeds – but here’s what I’ve gleaned from the media:
- Ballard cribbed a copyrighted artwork of a dog from the internet for her cover. It was a painting called Dreamer by Whyn Lewis. There was then an ‘anonymous’ post on a literary forum wherein the writer of Shy Girl admitted that they’d used an already-manipulated image of the painting and couldn’t trace the original artist. They assumed that hardly anyone would read the book, but later regretted not doing their due-diligence. They’d been contacted by the artist, who asked that they disclose all royalties earned from the book due to the infringement, and take down any remaining use of her artwork.
- When the book began to gain popularity and rave reviews, big publisher Hachette became interested. Oddly, they chose to use a similar image on their version of the cover. The book was released in the U.K., and then people began to post their belief that AI had been used to write it. Apparently there are some ‘tells’ that give AI away: repeated words, gaps in logic, an inconsistent ‘voice’ (a characteristic feel to an author’s writing), overuse of melodramatic adjectives and too much use of the rule of three (a long-standing writing principle that grouping things like characters or examples in threes is more satisfying and effective).
Now, let me just say that a lot of this could have occurred naturally. Authors often fall back on their favourite words and repeat them throughout their first draft; I always do a word search on my first edit to weed those out and improve the writing. Melodramatic adjectives are nothing new either – they’re usually just a sign of bad writing. And some authors may have read about the Rule of Three and decided they should use it.
However, Max Spero, founder of Pangram, heard about Shy Girl and decided to run the full text through his A.I. detection software. It indicated that the book was 78 percent A.I. generated. Readers began to react strongly, and the phrase “AI slop” came up.
Mia Ballard is a black author, and there have been allegations of racism in the intense furor that’s since landed her in the hospital with stress. It’s certainly not unheard of. She maintains that she wrote the original story, but then gave it to a friend to edit, and that’s where the AI crept in. However, editors aren’t supposed to rewrite the text, just guide the author toward a better book.
In situations like this, the responsibility falls on the author, together with the publisher, to make sure they’re putting out something authentic. The Salt Path seemed to show that doing a long walk in the fresh air could reverse a terminal disease. It offered hope to a lot of people in the same boat, and they felt betrayed when the truth came out.
Publishers and authors are struggling to maintain their credence in the face of the AI storm. In the U.K., the Society of Authors has launched a ’Human Authored’ scheme. Authors can register their books and download a “Human Authored” logo to put on their back cover.
With so much misuse of AI to scrape material from legit books without authors’ permissions or reimbursement, and the lack of adequate legislation, writers now feel we have to formally state that we’ve actually written our own book. From what I understand, quite a few book reviewers and influencers endorsed Shy Girl, so this massive kerfuffle leaves them pretty gun-shy.
You know, there will always be people who abuse a situation or a technology. As I commented to one influencer, all any of us can do is act in good faith under the best circumstances we have available.
So I will continue to write my novels, from scratch (and design my own covers using copyright-free fonts and graphics), and edited without the use of any AI whatsoever. I prefer to be an authentic creator, human and as real as it gets. It’s what readers want, and I believe there are many of us prepared to try and restore some sanity to our topsy-turvy world.