Coral Hart

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 detecting software.

and take that to Hachette.

Hachette then get off their ass as it were and pull the book and then the author Mia Ballard 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And we don't know loads and loads about her because she's very much withdrawn from the public eye in the aftermath of all of this.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 a, 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.

There's like two layers to it.

Everybody is becoming familiar with certain kinds of AI writing tells, right?

There's things like negative parallelisms, 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.

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.