Today, Explained - Is it a bad book or is it AI?

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

An author gets her book pulled after accusations that it was written with AI, but it might not always be so easy to catch AI writing. This episode was produced by Kelli Wessinger, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore and Bridger Dunnagan, and hosted by Noel King. Photo by Planet One Images/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI use and allegations of AI use are causing chaos in the publishing industry. Some authors have had their books picked apart and their careers destroyed. AI scandal that is shocking the book industry. If you're wondering if it's AI slop, it is AI slop. AI accusations are no fucking joke. Some writers say AI is just a tool and they feel no shame about using it. I'm Coral Hart and I write AI-powered romance novels that are topping Amazon charts. So is it that AI is so?

soulless and could never replicate what humans do, or is it pretty compelling? Coming up on Today, Explained, a scandal, an experiment, and a question, can books survive the AI revolution? Support for Today Explain comes from Service Now. AI is moving fast, but without visibility, it's just chaos, different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. A mess. Service now turns that mess into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. Oh, what it's doing, what it's done, what it's about to do so you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist,

and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Butterfly in the sky. I can go twice as high. Take a look.

It's in a book. AI. Image in West Night, journalist, novelist, wrote about a recent, massive blowup in the publishing industry for Slate. So what happened was an author called Mia Ballard, American author, self-published, a horror novel called Shy Girl. and the conceit of this book is it is about a woman who is down on her luck financially and decides to sign up for a sugar baby website in the hopes of fixing that she gets put in touch with this man and enters his orbit and eventually he sort of kidnaps her and decides to keep her as a pet like a dog in a sort of cage and on a collar and forbids her from speaking except to say woof and not to

woof to actually say woof, which is a bit strange, there we go. This is who I am now. A pet. A shape carved by someone else's hands. A thing devoured piece by peace until there is nothing left but obedience. The quiet and the hurt until hurt is all that remains. During the course of this incarceration, she starts to take on kind of animal qualities and finds herself actually seemingly turning into a dog. I chose the man who wanted not who I was, but who I could become, a pet, a prisoner. She self-publishes this book, and it's popular among bands of self-published horror online. And then what happened was, as often enough happens these days,

is that a big traditional publisher, in this case, Hichette, will see a self-published novel and see that it's popular and decide to then publish it again under the imprint of their own house. and that can be a pretty good deal for the house and for the author because they get a book deal and a payment and the publishing house know that people like this book already and therefore it's likely to earn a profit. So they do this, they contact her. It then gets published in the UK by Hachette and is slated for publication in the US a little bit later than that. People begin to read this book more widely now that it's out with a major publishing house

and discussion begins to pop up on places like book talk. The writing felt really flat, it felt surface level, and underdeveloped, which could be a clear sign of AI usage. I was just reading sentences and I was like, that doesn't even mean anything. And Reddit. Shy Girl by Mia Ballard. Does anyone else think this was written by ChapGPT?

It has this very recognizable and constant rhythmic use of adjectives and similes that stinks of AI. This conversation kind of gathers speed, people agreeing that there's something kind of off about the book. And then it all gained a little bit more attention. There was a user, a YouTube book person called Frankie's Shelf, who made a three-hour-long video dissecting this book and all the things that they thought gave the signs of being AI generated.

It's so empty. It's flat in every way. themes, characters, plot, writing. And that is because, in my opinion, large chunks of this book were written with assistance from a generative AI. The New York Times then get involved and decide to run their own little investigation into the book doing things like putting it through AI detective software and take that to Hachette. Hachet then get off their ass, as it were, and pull the book. And then the author of Belaard has issued very sort of sparse.

statements about this, she gave a quote to the New York Times saying, you know, that this is essentially ruined her life and her reputation. But the interesting claim that she made was not that there was no AI in the book, but that potentially there was AI in the book because she had hired or asked a third party to edit the book. What do we know about the author? This is her second book. She published another just self-published. And we don't know. loads and loads about her because she's very much withdrawn from the public eye in the aftermath of all of this. An extra layer to the narrative around all of this is that she's a black woman and therefore someone who is traditionally less interesting to big publishing houses and is afforded less time

and attention. It would be silly to argue that none of the vitriol is linked to the fact that She's a black woman author. You know, I think there's like, one ought to be careful about the way that we talk about this because this is someone from, like, from publishing terms anyway, certainly, like a disadvantaged background who's been given this big platform and has attracted like a lot of flack for this potential use of AI. You read the book. For your money, what made it so obvious that AI had been used?

There's like two layers to it. everybody is becoming familiar with certain kinds of AI writing tells, right? There's things like negative paralyisms, that thing where it's like, it's not just this, it's this, or excessive use of metaphor and similes, especially ones that don't quite make sense or that come very rapidly one after another. Then the door bursts open and he enters like a storm, dragging the sour stink of liquor behind him, his presence filling the room and turning the pastel air brittle in his hands as a cake gleam. It's pink frosting too smooth, like plastic dipped in sugar, like something that belongs on a screen, too perfect to hold.

Every noun having an adjective attached, certain kind of repetitive syntactical blocks that appear. So there's all of that. There is all of that. But that on its own, you know, AI chatbots write like that because humans did once. You know, like it's an aggregate of all human writing it can get its hands on. So I would kind of think that that on its own isn't quite enough. That's what makes this so difficult, right? Because you can find that in human writing too. But it is, and this will sound wishy-washy,

but I think people will know what I mean if they've read large chunks of AI writing, is that there's something that happens when you read AI-generated text over a long, like something as long as a novel, is that there is just this like spidey sense you get about it, of flatness. It's just, it's very emotionally one note. There's very little variety in the texture of the prose. And yeah, it's a feeling. It's a feeling where you sense literally a lack of mind behind the text. So you've been clear that we don't actually know the truth of what happened here.

We have an author saying an editor must have inserted AI later on. You understand publishing a lot more than I do. Do you find it believable that that could have happened? In a way, yes because Ah it's possible I don't think it's possible for it to have happened without her noticing

I think she must have known about it if, if, if a third party did I mean it sounds obviously I have no idea it sounds unlikely that it was done by a third party if I had to nail my colours to the mast

I would think that probably it was her obviously I have no idea but that seems like Occam's razor most likely but then it ought to have been picked up when it went through her shed

you know the problem with self-publishing to traditional publishing pipeline is that because the book is complete and also because the book has a proven audience already, editors are therefore maybe reasonably. They take the book in and they think, well, not much needs to be done with this because it's a complete work already. You know, it might not be as rigorous in editing processes it would be if just an unpublished first draft came in on an editor's desk. Another is that editors, unfortunately for everybody, including themselves, have less and less time for editing.

Like in the major publishing houses, people talk about this all the time within the industry that so much more of their work in recent years has been given over to stuff that needs doing, like campaign work or liaising with authors, but it is leaving less and less time for them to do the work of editing because the publishing houses don't have enough staff and all these kind of bigger picture issues.

So where we've ended up here is that readers feel betrayed, a writer's career is more or less destroyed. Hachette looks kind of foolish. They do. It makes you wonder whether anyone is talking about guardrails in place to keep this from happening again, or whether at the moment it's just like, we've got to wait until the sleuths on Reddit figure out that there's a soullessness to this thing and start asking questions. I mean that I think everybody is talking about what those guardrails could or should. be. Like, that's a, it's a very hot topic, I think, among, like, editors all over the place. But it's a really tricky one because AI detection software is the sort of first thing that you

might think, okay, well, everything should get run through one of those. Those, when you dig into them, pretty unreliable. Yeah, they're not as good as one might hope. I mean, they'll pick up extremely obvious instances of AI, that they may not pick up, they just may not pick up everything. And then then you've got this difficult thing. Let's say you have a manuscript from an author and you put that through an AI detection software and it comes up like 70% likely AI. You know, depends who that is. If this is an author that you are very keen not to, you know, it's relational stuff, the publishing industry. You don't want to accuse someone of doing something that at the moment anyway in the current cultural climate is kind of insulting. Like did you actually

not write this book, did you get, did you cheat, you know? That's a really difficult conversation to have unless you're completely sure and it's really difficult to be completely sure. The thing about AI writing is that it is, it cannot be original in flavour. Like that's the very nature of it. It's a averaging out of everything it can get its hands on. I don't know. I mean, maybe this position will sort of die out, which is,

depressing to me, but I feel like I would rather read a bad book written by a human than a quote unquote good one written by AI because at least, you know, to me, to me what is valuable about a book is there, is it as a piece of art and to know that somebody had like something they wanted to say and maybe they will succeed at that and maybe they will fail? But that that's, that's the kind of transaction that you enter into with an author. It's like, okay, here's what I tried to do, like meet me there with it. But if it's just something that has been churned out by a machine with like no love for the, no love for the game, no craft, no intention, then I have no interest in reading

that. Imogen West Knight is a writer. Coming up, could your closest friends tell the difference between something you wrote and something AI wrote, an author, experiments? Support for the show comes from chime. Banking can sometimes feel like you're playing a game of Dodgeball. Love Dodgeball. Doing everything in your power to not get hit with overdraft fees, minimum balance requirements, and monthly fees.

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So I think there's this, I don't know, misconception among writers, among readers, that there's a certain kind of way that AI generates language, and it's super different from the way writers do. And it was seeming to me from some research that I've read and from my own experiences that that was probably not true. So I wanted to do a kind of strange and dramatic thing, which was to see if people who knew my work really well could distinguish between my work and AI generated imitations of my work that were created in a specific way that made them similar to my work. So there's a research named Tuhin Chakrabarthi, whose work I've covered before. And he had already conducted this experiment. He and colleagues basically trained AI models on the work of established, accomplished writers.

And what that means is he basically got the AI model to generate language that looked a lot like language from those authors. And then he had readers who were graduate writing students read those passages generated by AI and also read imitations by fellow graduate writing students and say which one they liked better. And they tended to like the ones by the AI models more than the ones by actual human beings. And so I had him do the same thing with my work, but a twist on it. I had him train an AI model on my previous book. my three previous books on pieces of journalism I've written. And then I had him get his AI model to generate passages sounding like something from a forthcoming

novel that I haven't published yet or shared with anyone. And then I put that alongside passages that I had written. I sent those to people who know my work really well. I'm talking about like my best friend since I was 13, writer friends who I've known since I was 19, 20 years old. And I asked if they could tell the difference, and none of them could. None of them. All right. So the people who know you best in the world don't know you that well, apparently, or AI is exceptionally good at what it is doing. Give me some examples of what happened

here. Can you read me something maybe that you wrote and then something that the AI wrote? And let's see if I just met you, but let's see if I can tell any differences. It's funny because I can't remember now which ones are mine and which ones are the AI. Gaya said it seemed to her that we'd been on similar trajectories. We'd both spent many years creating something that we cared deeply about. I, with my journalism, she with her startup, and then gone on to focus on empowering others to do the same. She said she'd been surprised to find that mentoring other founders was even more meaningful than running her own startup.

In business terms, the ROI was higher if you are willing to count fulfillment as a return. That's nice. I like that. Yeah, that was, I would say, as writing, that was nice. Beginning, middle end lands on a point. I enjoyed it. That one was actually AI. No.

Damn. AI, AI, you landed in such a nice, a nice spot. Okay. Okay, girl. Read me something that you wrote, please. Okay. I guess, yeah, now we have a spoiler that I'm going to read you something from me. Okay.

I'd like to argue that we write because we feel compelled to, no matter whether anyone will read them. But is that true? When I was younger, I used to keep a journal for myself. I didn't want anyone else to ever read it, which meant I didn't need to describe the people in places I was writing about or explain why they mattered. when my mom did read my journal in the ninth grade, I considered it the biggest betrayal I'd ever experienced, but the saving grace was knowing that she could not have possibly understood

most of what I was writing about. I had an audience of one myself. Much better. I like the AI, but that was obviously much. I don't know. I sent you up to say that. No, no, actually, you didn't. I would be very honest, and I did, I did sort of want to curveball you. But that was very pretty.

Do me a favor. Read the first two sentences of what you wrote, one more time for me? I'd like to argue that we write because we feel compelled to, no matter whether anyone will read them. But is that true? Wait, we write, what is the them referring to? It's an error.

It's a grammatical error on my part. Look at me. Okay, so. And good job catching it because a lot of people assumed that one was AI. And I think the best indication that it was actually me is that there is that grammatical error because AI wouldn't have made a grammatical error like that. This is the thing that I would like us to talk about. AI does not make mistakes. And in the first half of the show, we are guest, also a writer, described AI as kind of soulless. And I think that

was part of what she was pointing to. What you read me by the AI wasn't bad. It sort of seemed like something that I might read in like lean in, right? You enjoy mentoring of. You enjoy mentoring other people, I'm going to hear why. So question for you, when all this was said and done, people could not tell what was you, people who know you well couldn't tell what was you and what was AI. What did you feel about that? Did you feel threatened? Did you feel suspicious of your friends and family? You know, I was of two minds because on the one hand, I didn't feel threatened, but I found myself questioning my own assumption about myself, which is that I identify as a writer

who is very invested in originality, who really wants every new book to be completely different from the previous books. And so the fact that this AI was trained on my previous books and could predict the style of the writing, in the new book suggested that I wasn't as original as I thought, that my new book wasn't as different from the previous books as I thought. And at the same time, on the other hand, I actually felt vindicated

because I disagree with the other author, who is your previous guest, about the soullessness of AI-generated text. I don't think that AI-generated text is, by definition, easily distinguishable from human text because of a kind of of soullessness inherent in the text. Okay, but can most readers tell that something is AI versus something written by a human? It seems like they can't. And I can't myself, and this actually gets back to what we were discussing earlier about

the question of whether AI generated text is convincing or soulless. And I think the reason a lot of people assume AI writing is going to sound soulless is that AI companies in their most recent versions of their products have created these products that are specifically designed to sound a certain way, like a certain kind of corporate customer service speak kind of way. And so people think that's just what AI sounds like, right? Like that's somehow inherently the way AI sounds. But it's not true. AI can sound any number of ways. So it's technically very easy, actually, to build an AI, to train an AI model that sounds human-like, even literary. The reason we're not that familiar with it is that that's not what

the products look like currently. So ultimately, do you think AI is going to end up changing our relationship to literature? Do you think everybody who reads is going to be as skeptical and skeved out as you and I are? Well, research shows not only that in some cases people prefer AI-generated text to human-generated text, but also that if they're told that a piece of text is AI-generated, they become uninterested in it. And so it seems clear that people in general, the reading public, does not want to read text generated by AI. if they know that it's generated by AI. You know, I think we focus a lot on this human technology binary,

on like, oh, it's weird of a machine creates the language. But I think a big part of it is that we want to be communicating with one another. We don't want to be receiving our arts from enormous tech companies that have a lot of wealth and have a lot of power and want to control us, right? So for me, it's really about do we want to communicate with other people, or do we want to receive text from enormous technology companies? Wahini Vara, writer, journalist, contributor to Businessweek and The Atlantic and The New Yorker. Her book's searches is out in paperback.

Kelly Wessinger produced today's show and is the voice of Shy Girl. Amina El Sadi edited. Gabriel Dunedov, Check the Facts, and David Tattashoor and Bridger Dunigan, engineer. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained. Thank you.