Andrea Bartz is a prolific novelist with an impressive résumé. Since 2019, she has published five thrillers, become a New York Times bestselling author, had her work optioned by the likes of Netflix and Hulu, and picked up an endorsement from Reese Witherspoon’s influential book club.
She also has a legal claim to fame: Bartz was the lead plaintiff in a class-action suit against Anthropic that alleged the company had downloaded millions of copyrighted books from pirate sites to use as training data for its models. Anthropic last year agreed to pay $1.5 billion in the largest copyright settlement in US history.
But while Bartz and many other writers were on guard against this plunder of their work, another AI threat was brewing. What happens when authors are accused of relying on artificial intelligence themselves?
This past March, the publishing industry found out: Following widespread speculation on social media that a horror novel titled Shy Girl was largely AI-generated, and a Times article about those claims, Hachette Book Group canceled an upcoming US publication run for the novel and discontinued it in the UK, where it had already been released. According to Pangram, a robust but by no means infallible AI detection tool, some 78 percent of the text was AI-generated.
Mia Ballard, the author of Shy Girl, has denied allegations that she used AI to write the novel, claiming that an editor was responsible for AI-assisted changes to a previously self-published version of the book. She has also said that she is pursuing legal action. Since that scandal broke, several more fiction authors have run afoul of AI suspicions, one after winning a short story prize, another after publishers bid into the millions for his crime novel. Both have denied these allegations as well.
But Bartz notes that once the accusations start, the damage is done. As the Shy Girl scandal erupted, she says, “I kind of immediately felt like this was going to lead to a potential witch hunt.” The unavoidable emergence of AI in publishing, she explains, will “have the unintended effect of leading anyone to be able to accuse anyone of using AI,” and at the moment, authors have little recourse in defending themselves against these charges. “There’s no agreed upon standard,” Bartz says, in proving human authorship.
The developers of a host of new software tools hope to change that. Platforms including Workings, Blindproof, Wintertext, Human Ink, and ObraVera promise the means to track and document an author’s writing process, in some cases encrypting and fingerprinting the written work or typing rhythms with unique codes, in order to produce a record of authorship (whether entirely human or AI-assisted). The idea is not just to create a paper trail that writers can point to if someone questions whether they used an LLM but to demonstrate provenance when, for example, text is scraped into AI training sets without attribution or other identifying metadata.