What an Odd thing to Say

I can't read the New York Times story on this, but it sounds like an up-and-coming author won't be coming anymore as accusations of artificial intelligence use are being leveled at her and her work.

In sum, author Mia Ballard's "Shy Girl" - a horror novel outside my area of interest - might be as much as 78% written by artificial intelligence.

Of course, that's a dicey measurement.

AI detectors look at patterns to determine if writing is machine produced, using the same kind of large language models that AI uses, so there's lots of ickiness to go around. I teach at a university in its English department, and we're cautioned about using these AI-detectors as there are plenty of things that trigger the AI detectors that aren't necessarily AI.

I started watching the "Frankie's Shelf" video at this link from Jezebel, but as it clocks in at nearly three hours, there's no chance in hell I'm going to finish it all.

But the evidence presented is telling.

The cover on her self-published book was ripped off from another artist.

There's odd formatting issues throughout the book - something you might chalk up to the initial indie publishing of the story - and readings and analyses by sleuths from Goodreads to the New York Times detect AI patterns throughout.

The author, in her defense, claims it was a developmental editor who introduced AI to the story. And that seems an odd thing to say. Surely an author, whose reputation depends on the words he or she writes, would read anything doctored by an editor and notice enough differences to send up their own red flags before pushing that publish button.

Whether or not that's true should be easy to determine: A draft of the novel before the editor got it could be examined to see if it has the tells of artificial intelligence. I highly doubt that will come to pass.

And Hachette, her publisher in the UK and would-be publisher in the US, should have detected the AI, but clearly the idea of a new novel got in their eyes. Only after the NYT analysis did they pull the plug.