Earlier this year, a group of 10,000 authors, including acclaimed writers like Kazuo Ishiguro, Malorie Blackman and Lucy Foley, collaborated to publish an empty novel titled Don’t Steal This Book. Their aim? To protest the unlicensed use of their work to train AI models and raise awareness of how artificial intelligence threatens to replace human novelists altogether.
Just ten days later, Hachette withdrew one of its titles because of alleged AI use. The book in question was Shy Girl, a horror novel by popular author Mia Ballard. This case is the first of its kind, and yet another example of how quickly artificial intelligence is shaking up the publishing industry.
Controversy
Ballard originally self-published Shy Girl in February 2025. Since its release, reviewers have repeatedly questioned whether large sections of the book were written by AI, with one post garnering over a million views. Despite the controversy, Shy Girl continued to sell successfully. This impressive sales performance likely encouraged Hachette to take on the novel in November with little need for editing or vetting. But with so much attention suddenly on this story, the rumours surrounding it reached a fever pitch. According to the New York Times, an AI-detection tool estimated that up to 78 per cent of the book could have been generated using artificial intelligence.
Hachette eventually took note in March 2026, pulling Shy Girl’s UK title and cancelling its American release. It claims to have done so to ‘[protect] original creative expression and storytelling.’ In response, Ballard released a statement on social media saying that she did not use AI to write any section of her novel. She argued that her editor, ‘someone in [her] writing group,’ as supposed to a professional, ‘changed a lot of [her] writing’ from the first draft and could have run it through AI without her knowledge. She is currently in the process of suing Hachette for $1 million because her ‘name [has been] ruined for something [she] didn’t even personally do.’
But this article is not about trying to discern who is right or wrong in this situation. That would be very difficult to establish. In Ballard’s defence, AI-detection tools can be woefully unreliable. And if an author just so happens to write in a similar style to AI-generated content, with ‘tells’ like em dashes, ‘it’s not X, it’s Y’ or repetition, then there is no easy way for them to definitively prove that their work is self-generated. However, instead of focusing on this particular controversy, I’d like to delve into why AI-generated books are such a big deal in the first place. Does it matter, for instance, where our entertainment comes from, so long as it’s entertaining? The answer to this will differ greatly depending on whom you ask.
Originality
AI bots trawl the internet, absorbing and processing information that they come across at lightning speed. Because it learns language from pre-existing sources, many people question whether AI-generated content is truly unique or whether it’s thinly veiled plagiarism. However, this dilemma made me realise that humans are not that dissimilar to an AI. After all, we are an amalgamation of all the information we have ever accumulated. And just like an AI, we pick up certain phrases and syntax from our environment: the books we read, the people we talk to, our favourite films and music, the social media channels we follow or the region we are from. In this sense, no human author can ever make a statement that is truly original — in which case, are we being overly harsh on AI chatbots? Journalist Gideon Lewis-Kraus thinks so. He claims that AI-generated content is original because it is a ‘transformative practice’:
‘It’s not simply regurgitating stuff that it has read before; it is generalising that stuff and then reproducing new work that follows along those lines,’ he writes.
But this is arguably a bit of a grey area. Evidence shows that AI Large Language Models (LLMs) have been trained using copyrighted material without the permission of novelists or publishers since their inception. In fact, Anthropic was forced to pay $1.5 billion to writers whose books it had pirated to develop its model, Claude, in September. This just goes to show the complete disregard AI start-ups have for the writer’s craft. Anthropic were only willing to compensate the authors they were profiting from when ordered to do so by a judge. And from the way that they swiftly agreed to such a hefty settlement suggests that they knew they were in the wrong. So, yes, you can argue that content churned out by AI is ‘original.’ But how it went about gaining its skills remains up for debate.
Creativity
The real reason we should reject AI-generated content is not because of questions surrounding its quality or legality, but on principle. Nobody in their right mind should support the very thing that is destroying authors’ livelihoods at scale. A 2025 survey revealed that 39 per cent of novelists claim that GenAI has negatively affected their income. Half fear it will displace their work entirely.
Also, think of it this way: if all the books in the world were AI-generated, every novel would be nearly indistinguishable from the last. That’s because chatbots lack the ingenuity and imagination of humans, which arguably requires real experiences. Even Anthony Horowitz, who regularly employs ChatGPT during the writing process, admits that AI has limited creativity. It is true that some human authors also lack originality, churning out one bland book after another just to make a quick buck. Still, if your only two options were to pick up an uninspiring novel written by a person or one written by an AI, always choose the one that involved human toil. I highly doubt anyone would spend their money on a book if they knew it had only taken a couple of hours to generate, as supposed to a year of hard work and dedication.
Reading is largely about the connection between writers and ourselves. We are kindred spirits, longing to communicate something about the human condition. A machine can never fully appreciate this need. It has no soul, no consciousness, no lived experience. Ultimately, artificial intelligence is a poor imitation of human intelligence and creativity. It’s time we realised that the real thing can’t be beat.
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