Last week, I went on a mission, and it was vital I didn’t get caught. That was the feeling, as I made my way to a shopping centre in Canary Wharf, and suppressed an apology at the till. I was in one of the few Waterstones in London that had a copy of the horror novel Shy Girl in stock. The book was technically not available for sale, having been pulled by its publisher after allegations that it was written using AI. But there was still the odd bookshop yet to remove the title from its shelves.
The clandestine nature of my trip was inevitable — earlier in the month I had been a signatory of Don’t Steal This Book, a book printed with around 10,000 authors’ names, in a copyright campaign against AI being “built on stolen work”, without “permission or payment”. Reading a book because it was written by artificial intelligence was not a message I wanted to convey, not without the context.
My aversion to AI being used to write novels began as theoretical but it turns out it’s also personal. I’m one of many whose work has been absorbed into AI training machines without permission — my novels are in LibGen, the database Meta used to train AI, which consists of pirated books. (And that’s just what I know about.) My assumption before I started reading Shy Girl was that AI fiction would lack structure or pulse, would be unable to sustain story or build tension, and could not achieve genuine beauty . . . well, you know what they say about assumptions. Except, in this instance, forget what they say, because it’s all true. Shy Girl is desperately dull. Human choice sounds like surprise, diversion — instead, you can hear AI’s metronome. The prose smacks of mechanical process. (The novel is shaped by AI but the semantics are disputed: the author, Mia Ballard, denies using AI herself — she told the New York Times that someone she hired to edit the novel, when it was originally self-published, had used AI.)