Allegations stick. It's an uncomfortable truth we all know. We also know that cheating the system really sucks and casts a very wide shadow on all those within the system. As I have said many times before, I'm an endurance athlete in my spare time, so I've seen how that works many times within the sports I love.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
Now it's happening in the literary world. Allegations of the use of AI in the writing process are getting higher profile at the same time as many platforms are making explicit their rules outlawing just such a practice, in large part in response to the outcry of creators over copyright infringement. Following in the wake of Shy Girl and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, this week we have two hugely consequential allegations. And one of those has come after one of our own, the indie sensation H. M. Wolfe.
Daggermouth is the highest-profile indie bestseller of the past year, a book I noted had been cited as being at the forefront of the emerging dystomance genre. It secured Wolfe a seven-figure, two-book deal with Simon & Schuster. Now a study by computer scientist Tuhin Chakrabarty, which looked at thousands of self-published titles on Amazon, claims that the book may be 60 percent AI-generated and talks about those “telltale signs” that cause eye-rolls among authors everywhere.
Simon & Schuster has (at the time of writing) still stood by Wolfe. And Jane Friedman, in her always excellent coverage, points out that one of the main purposes of the research in question is not to expose grifting as the media may suggest but to find out how AI may be diluting the market (which would assist in making a case against fair use).
At the same time, another seven-figure book deal, for Jerry Falade's debut Call Me, I'll Hide the Body, has been dropped after the publishers felt they could no longer substantiate that it hadn't been AI-assisted.
Stories like this do two things. First, they dispel the myth (which I will not apologize for pointing out I have been saying in this column for several years is a myth) that AI cannot produce work of a nature that audiences will lap up. But second, they raise very complicated questions about trust, disclosure, and proof that we are all going to have to think about very clearly in the months and years ahead. And they encourage a level of armchair detection that can have devastating consequences for authors.
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