AI wrote my novel and I didn’t notice

That’s actually the defense used here, (gift link) which is remarkable given that the defense seems worse than the accusation:

Hachette Book Group, one of the largest publishers in the United States, pulled a forthcoming horror novel on Thursday in a decision that followed widespread allegations online that the author, Mia Ballard, relied heavily on artificial intelligence to write the book.

On Thursday, a day after The New York Times approached Hachette citing evidence that the novel appeared to be A.I.-generated, the company said it was pulling the book from publication. By Thursday afternoon, the novel was removed from Amazon and the Hachette website.

Hachette told The Times that its Orbit imprint decided not to publish “Shy Girl,” which was due out in the United States this spring, after conducting a thorough and lengthy review of the text. Hachette said it will also discontinue the book in the U.K., where it was published last fall and has sold 1,800 print copies, according to NielsenIQ BookData.

“Hachette remains committed to protecting original creative expression and storytelling,” a Hachette spokeswoman said. She added that Hachette requires all submissions to be original to the authors, and asks authors to disclose to the company whether they are using A.I. during the writing process.

In an email to The Times late on Thursday night, Ballard denied using A.I. to write “Shy Girl,” contending that an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version of the novel had used A.I.

“This controversy has changed my life in many ways and my mental health is at an all time low and my name is ruined for something I didn’t even personally do,” she wrote, noting that she could not elaborate on how the book had been edited with A.I. because she was pursuing legal action.

“Shy Girl,” about a desperate young woman who is held hostage by a man she met online and forced to live as his pet, was self-published in February 2025.

Side note: from a purely commercial perspective, I found it interesting that a self-published novel that sold 1,800 copies in the UK once it was traditionally published could then get a book deal with a Big Four publisher six months later.

I do think this kind of thing raises a lot of issues about how we’re going to regulate the production of pseudo-texts by LLMs rather that what apparently is going to become the bespoke luxury production model of actual human authorship (This is already a massive problem in academia).