Earlier this month, Orbit Books, a US imprint of the Hachette publishing giant specialising in genre fiction, cancelled the publication of Shy Girl. The initially self-published novel by debut novelist Mia Ballard became a breakout success among horror fans, via Goodreads and social media buzz; after it was republished in the UK last year, though, readers and commentators began to note aspects of its prose style that were strongly suggestive of generative AI. In January, a book YouTuber using the name Frankie’s Shelf posted a video essay about it bluntly entitled I’m Pretty Sure This Book is AI Slop, outlining in impressive detail an abundance of evidence that the book was substantially created using a large language model (LLM).

(I want to take a parenthetical moment here to marvel at the fact that this YouTube video is two hours and 40 minutes long, almost exactly the same run-time as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Best Picture-winning One Battle After Another, and actually longer than his previous Oscar winner, There Will Be Blood. I wish I could tell you why the hell the video is so long, but I haven’t watched it, because it’s two hours and 40 minutes long.)

Ballard’s attempt to defend her work probably did more harm than good. In an interview with the New York Times, she blamed the LLM usage on a freelance editor she claimed to have hired before self-publishing the book, saying the editor had added the AI elements without her knowledge. Whether or not this defence is convincing is probably beside the point, as Ballard is hardly the main villain of the piece anyway. This isn’t to say she bears no responsibility, but rather that the whole depressing affair emerges out of deeper fault lines in the publishing business, and in our culture more generally.

A report on Shy Girl from Pangram, the AI detection software, apparently flagged certain phrases that were almost certainly generated by AI. According to a recent........

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