AI Writing Is Not a Threat to the Arts. It's an Insult.
Everyone is talking about AI stealing my job, but the real victim is anyone who enjoys reading something worthy of their time.
WRITING NEWSCODY LEE
By now you may have heard of the Shy Girl scandal that is rocking the publishing world. If not, here’s a quick recap: In February of 2025 author Mia Ballard self-published her novel Shy Girl. The book gained traction on BookTok and was picked up by Hachette Book Group, a major traditional publisher. Then the internet got to work and uncovered prevalent use of AI, or what appeared to be AI, in the novel. Hachette then backed out of the deal, Mia Ballard blamed an unnamed non-professional “editor” from her writing group who she trusted to edit her novel and claims she never used AI herself. Now she’s threatening to take legal action.
The whole thing reeks and exposes several things wrong not only with AI but with the world of traditional publishing as well as the wider issue of literacy rates and media consumption in the country. We had an appetite for slop long before the machines arrived to shove it down our gullets (something that is often lost in all of this).
First and foremost, what does it say about an author who doesn’t review the edits their so-called editor made?
Secondly: are you kidding me, Hachette? For anyone unaware, Hachette is a major publisher, one of “The Big Five” New York-based publishing companies. This isn’t a grassroots indie or a vanity press. Far from it.
Regardless of who is actually accountable here, it’s a big ugly stain on both Ballard’s and Hachette’s reputation. Ballard will likely be black-listed by traditional publishers, at least until she writes the tell-all memoir about this whole debacle. But Hachette deserves plenty of scrutiny here as well.
Either this was an enormous oversight by a highly-trained editor at Hachette, or, worse, they knew of the potential use of AI and bought the book anyway.
The former can be forgiven, I think, though it calls into question the professionalism and talent of the editorial room there. But, hey, I get it. The technology moves fast and an industry veteran probably hasn’t spent much time reading or using ChatGPT and therefore wouldn’t recognize the offputting quirks that signal bot writing. But as myriad internet posts point out, the book just isn’t very good. Read a portion for yourself, and you’ll see what I mean. The figurative language and imagery is often nonsensical. Descriptive words such as “sharp” or “flicker” are repeated multiple times on the same page, sometimes even within the same paragraph. These are simple mistakes a professional editor would scrub out of a draft when preparing for publication.
Quite simply, the book should’ve never been pushed out without considerable revisions regardless of who or what wrote it.
And that makes me think the latter is more plausible than most want to admit. If traditional publishers, specifically The Big Five, are willing to put out AI books, this will have extraordinary and far reaching ramifications for a society that is already combating a literacy crisis, a media crisis, and a staggering inability to discern reality from fiction, let alone a human voice from a software program.
It’s a lot to digest. But mainly what I want to focus on is why AI writing is such an affront to both readers and writers alike. Why the vitriol coming from artists and creators is more than Luddite cavils about new technology and the threat of jobs being stolen.
Can AI even write fiction?
Seems like it. In the sense that it can narrate sequential events experienced by a made-up character in a series of sentences and paragraphs across however many pages you ask of it. But if that’s all fiction is to you, then I’d argue you’re devoid of imagination and intellect.
To break it down further, there’s an old axiom that every story has already been told. Several writers have expressed some version of this but I’m partial to Cormac McCarthy’s “The ugly fact is that books are made out of books” because of how deliciously ironic it is in the world of LLMs.
Anna Quindlen’s statement from her wonderful 1999 Commencement Speech at Mount Holyoke is great, too, and far better for our purposes here:
“Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.”
The emphasis is mine. That “something” she is referring to is a writer’s voice. To Quindlen, and to any writer, voice means more than just tone and diction, but comprises the quirks, nuances, personality, deeply held convictions, loosely held convictions, confusions, contradictions, and ineffable qualities that make up a human being. Namely, the one doing the writing. Voice is the fingerprint, the DNA, the very flesh and blood of the creator.
You are, as a writer, offering yourself over to your readers. If you are a fiction writer this is especially true. Your writer’s voice is the only thing you have that is truly original because it is you. Others can attempt to mimic it but it can’t be recreated.
Every plot you can imagine has already been done. Every character you can conceive is an amalgamation of other characters you’ve encountered. Carl Jung based his life’s research on gathering every fable, fairytale, and myth he could only to find the same patterns repeated over and over regardless of which side of the globe he was on. Every story has been told countless times. Every book is made of books. Your voice is the one thing that is your own, and it is the very thing you are forfeiting when you hand over the reins to AI.
So, can AI write fiction?
Yes. Will that fiction be worth reading? I’m sure you can guess my answer.
But this question of worthiness seems to be the real sticking point for some people, which signals to me two things, at least initially:
a.) large swaths of people are no longer reading or consuming media of meaningful
quality (or have never learned how to appreciate voice and style in fiction) something research suggests is true.
b.) these folks have lost all faith in humanity or never had much to begin with.
I think those two things are probably related. To be a consumer of meaningful media is to be a human who believes in humanity since stories, history, art (what we call “The Humanities”) are a meditation on what it means to be human.
My estimation of “meaningful media” here is purposefully broad, but to give a pithy definition let’s go with: a piece of media that aspires to do more than entertain (or in this country, make lots of money for executives and shareholders). It’s not that the work can’t do these things, or that these goals weren’t considered when the creator produced the media, but they weren’t the primary goals driving creation.
The simplicity and inadequacy of even that definition for “meaningful media” makes the realities of the current literacy and media crisis even starker. We’ve set the limbo bar at shoulder level and still can’t clear it without bumping our noses.
And it is solely in this for-entertainment-purposes-only, product-driven arena where AI fiction exists. AI is built on machines that openly plagiarize and operate using overworn formulas by design. AI can’t have anything to say because it doesn’t have a voice. What it has is access to all the other voices that came before it and the ability to rearrange, cut and paste, and find loosely related synonyms. It relies on you to have the thing to say (your so-called “prompt”) then removes your voice from the equation entirely.
Congrats, you filled space with words.
But enough of my snobby grousing. Let’s explore the question of AI-fiction’s worthiness from a reader’s perspective. Of course a miserable tortured writer like myself is going to bemoan the use of AI. I’m a cranky mediocre artist whose (low-earning) job is at stake!
Chill Out, Dude! AI is Just a Tool.
A quick aside because the above statement is one I hear all the time. Typically it’s given by someone who isn’t a writer and perceives AI as another software program akin to a word processor. But this assessment fails to acknowledge two things:
LLMs, the AI “tools” used to generate writing are, as stated above, designed to plagiarize. They can’t account for cultural context or writerly intuition, both of which are crucial to creating meaningful art. They can only mimic what they see on a superficial level. This is why they’re so adept at creating stories rendered in tried-and-true formulas and why to the untrained eye it can be difficult to spot. (Not for nothing, Shy Girl is categorized as a horror novel, a genre celebrated and often measured on its formulas and tropes. It’ll be interesting to see what the first AI Literary novel that fools editors looks like should a publisher ever pick one up.)
The statement views writing purely as a product-driven endeavor. Input ideas; output writing. Whichever tool gets you to the output faster and more efficiently is “better.” There’s no accounting for craft or appreciation for the labor itself, which is where almost all of the vital discovery occurs in writing.
The truth is, if you find you can’t do the work itself and need a tool to do it for you, then you aren’t a writer. And this is fine! Maybe your artistic talents lie elsewhere. (Though I’m willing to bet if you talk to any digital artist, they’d have similar thoughts on AI’s use as a tool…)
And if by "tool" you mean a useful "super Google" to help research ideas and facts for your book, then sure, it's a tool. But beyond using it like the new-era Wiki, it has no place for the writer. But most people don't mean using it strictly for research. What they mean is a cheap, easy, and fast ghostwriter or editor. And thus the problem; it can’t write or edit well. See: the Shy Girl story.
This is the whole reason why people need to either study the craft themselves, or hire another to do the writing. A robot doesn't have human experience, empathy, or the "fingerprint" of a creator.
Okay, this aside actually leads nicely into my next point, the one I set out to write in the first place…
Why AI Is An Affront to Readers
As a writer, you are essentially making a contract with the reader. They offer their attention and you offer them something they deem worthy of their attention. The moment you stop doing that, you lose them. I won’t belabor my point about the importance of voice anymore than I already have, but readers go into a book expecting you to have done the craft work that makes reading your words worth their time. By utilizing LLMs to write fiction for the sake of “optimizing efficiency” or even “improving” your voice, you’re violating that contract. Even if the reader isn’t consciously aware of it, and even if you as the writer had good intentions, by using these tools you’ve just broken this tacit agreement.
(Believe it or not, some people like to read fiction simply because another human wrote it. Like it’s legitimately cool and interesting to them that another person possesses the talent, imagination, and work ethic to produce something like a book. Or a sculpture. Or a film. Or a song. Or a painting.)
Imagine going to a nice restaurant and finding out the chef microwaved the same Trader Joe’s meals you could’ve bought for yourself. A microwave is, after all, just a tool.
Okay, one more. Your lover reads you the most incredible poem articulating their tenderest feelings toward you. Then they follow it up saying they wrote it using an LLM. None of the words are theirs—but they used an original prompt!
Writing anything of value is hard. Writing meaningful fiction is very hard. It is supposed to be hard. If it were easy we’d have no use for it. By choosing not to hone one’s craft but hoping a machine can do that work for you, you’re essentially telling readers that your time is worth more than theirs. How can you expect them to invest in your world and characters if you can’t be bothered to?
In essence, using AI tools and LLMs in place of craft signals to the reader that the value in your writing isn’t in the ideas, but in the simple fact that the book exists as readable material in the world. It’s a function of our attention economy and late stage capitalism. What I make isn’t so important so long as I make something that garners attention!
This is perhaps the most galling aspect of AI to any self-respecting writer—the shameless devaluing of one’s own ideas in favor of publishing faster, bigger, wider, but certainly not better.