A publisher has canceled a horror novel it planned to release in the U.S. later this year after allegations that the book was written using artificial intelligence, the New York Times reports.
Hachette says it will not publish Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl, which was slated for a spring release in this country from the Orbit imprint. It will also stop selling the novel in the U.K., where it has been available since last fall.
Ballard’s novel features a woman who’s held captive by a man who wants her as a pet. Ballard self-published the book last year before it was picked up by Hachette.
Accusations that Ballard used AI to write the book surfaced months ago online. In a Reddit thread, several users speculated that the book relied on AI, with one commenting, “I strongly suspect Shy Girl was written by ChatGPT.…I’ve sadly read hundreds of thousands of words of ChatGPT creative writing. And this has every single indicator, every single linguistic tic. Of course it’s possible that this author copied the writing style of AI, specifically ChatGPT, but the simpler answer is that Mia Ballard uses ChatGPT to write.”
Ballard denied that she’d used AI to write the novel but told the Times that she’d hired an editor to revise the self-published manuscript and that this editor had used the technology.
“This controversy has changed my life in many ways and my mental health is at an all time low and my name is ruined for something I didn’t even personally do,” Ballard wrote to the Times in an email.
A spokesperson for Hachette told the newspaper that the publisher requires that all submissions be original and asks its authors to disclose if they’ve used AI to help with their writing.
“Hachette remains committed to protecting original creative expression and storytelling,” the spokesperson said.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
