Is it a bad book or is it AI?

Summary

Today, Explained: "Is It a Bad Book or Is It AI?"

Date: May 13, 2026
Hosts: Noel King, Sean Rameswaram
Key Guests: Imogen West-Knight (journalist, novelist), Wahini Vara (writer, journalist, novelist)
Episode Theme:
This episode dives into the chaos and controversy engulfing the publishing industry as the boundaries between human-authored and AI-generated books blur. With publishers, authors, and readers embroiled in accusations and confusion, the hosts investigate a recent scandal, examine the limits of AI detection, and run a daring experiment to see if even a close friend can tell human prose from machine output. The central question: Can books survive the AI revolution?

---

1. Scandal in the Publishing World

[00:12] - [05:32] The “Shy Girl” Controversy

• Imogen West-Knight recounts the recent scandal involving Mia Ballard, a self-published author whose horror novel, Shy Girl, was picked up by major publisher Hachette before being accused of heavy AI assistance.
• Plot of “Shy Girl”: A woman, financially desperate, becomes a sugar baby, is kidnapped, and is forced into a degrading pet-like captivity. Over time, she appears to take on canine traits.
  • Sample excerpt: "This is who I am now. A pet. A shape carved by someone else's hands..." [03:01]
• The book gained popularity among self-published horror fans, prompting Hachette to re-publish it.
• Once a wider readership encountered it, suspicions about AI involvement arose on BookTok and Reddit.
  • Quote: "The writing felt really flat... a clear sign of AI usage." [04:39]
  • Reddit user: "Does anyone else think this was written by ChatGPT?" [04:45]

[05:32] - [07:09] Analysis of the Scandal

• A YouTube critic produced a three-hour breakdown identifying traits common in AI-generated writing (“rhythmic use of adjectives and similes that stinks of AI” [04:50]).
• The New York Times investigated using AI detection software and, after presenting findings to Hachette, the publisher pulled the book.
• Author Mia Ballard issued sparse statements, suggesting a third-party editor may have used AI without her knowledge.

Identity and Industry Bias

• Imogen West-Knight notes that Ballard, a Black woman, faced harsher scrutiny and that her disadvantaged background in the industry influenced perceptions and reactions.
  • Quote: "It would be silly to argue that none of the vitriol is linked to the fact that she's a Black woman author..." [06:15]

---

2. How Can We Tell What’s AI and What's Not?

[07:09] - [09:01] Spotting AI Text

• Growing familiarity with AI “tells”:
  • Negative parallelisms: "It's not just this, it's this."
  • Excessive or stacked metaphors that strain logic.
  • Almost every noun has an adjective.
  • Example from “Shy Girl”: “He enters like a storm, dragging the sour stink of liquor behind him, his presence filling the room and turning the pastel air brittle...” [07:35]
• Yet, these tells aren’t definitive: flatness, repetitiveness, and “emotional one note” writing can also be found in human-generated works.
  • Quote: "It’s very emotionally one note... It’s a feeling where you sense literally a lack of mind behind the text." – Imogen West-Knight [08:29]

[09:01] - [11:06] Can Editors Catch It?

• West-Knight doubts the editor-inserted-AI theory, noting that such major changes should be obvious to an author.
• Publishing “pipeline problems”: Self-published books picked up by publishers often go through less rigorous editing, leaving more room for such issues to slip through.
  • Quote: "Editors... have less and less time for editing... so much more of their work... has been given over to stuff that needs doing, like campaign work or liaising with authors." [09:56]

[11:06] - [13:23] The Inadequacy of AI Detection and the Value of Human Writing

• Editors and publishers are discussing “guardrails,” but detection tools are unreliable—risking false positives and fraught accusations.
  • Quote: "...AI detection software... pretty unreliable. Yeah, they're not as good as one might hope." – West-Knight [11:09]
• Personal Stand: "I'd rather read a bad book written by a human than a 'good' one written by AI..." [12:38]

---

3. Experiment: Human vs. AI—Can You Tell?

[17:06] - [22:26] Wahini Vara’s Test

• Wahini Vara set up an experiment: She worked with a researcher to train an AI model on her previous books and journalism. The AI then generated passages in her style about a new, unpublished novel.
• She gave these passages, mixed with her own writing, to close friends (including lifelong acquaintances) and asked them to distinguish which were AI.
  • Result: “None of them could.” [19:35]

Reading Samples (Live Test)

• Vara reads a passage about mentoring and ROI (written by AI) which Noel King admires for its narrative structure [20:32].
  • Reveal: "That one was actually AI." – Wahini Vara [20:42]
• After reading her own passage about journal writing and betrayal, King notices a subtle grammatical error—a “tell” of human imperfection.
  • Quote: "The best indication that it was actually me is that there is that grammatical error, because AI wouldn't have made a grammatical error like that." – Vara [22:14]

Authenticity and “Soullessness”

• Vara challenges the idea of inherent AI soullessness:
  • AI can and does produce convincing, even literary, prose—sometimes preferred by readers.
  • The real issue may be a psychological barrier: "If they're told text is AI generated, they become uninterested in it." [25:44]
  • Quote: “…we want to be communicating with one another. We don’t want to be receiving our art from enormous tech companies...” – Wahini Vara [25:44]

---

4. Key Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Imogen West-Knight on AI “flatness”:

  "There's something that happens when you read AI-generated text over... something as long as a novel, is that there is just this like spidey sense... there’s very little variety in the texture of the prose." [08:29]

• Wahini Vara on finding herself in AI’s imitation:

  "The fact that this AI was trained on my previous books and could predict the style of the writing in the new book suggested that I wasn't as original as I thought..." [23:12]

• Discussion of reactivity to AI authorship:

  "If they're told that a piece of text is AI-generated, they become uninterested in it." [25:44]

• Human imperfection as an identifier:

  "The best indication that it was actually me is that there is that grammatical error, because AI wouldn't have made a grammatical error like that." [22:14]

• West-Knight on authenticity:

  "I would rather read a bad book written by a human than a 'good' one written by AI... to me, what is valuable about a book is it as a piece of art and to know that somebody had something they wanted to say..." [12:38]

---

5. Episode Structure & Timestamps

• [00:12] Opening and summary of AI chaos in publishing
• [02:13] Interview: Imogen West-Knight on the Shy Girl scandal
• [07:09] Signs of AI writing—how to spot it?
• [09:01] Can the “editor did it” claim be true? The reality of editing in publishing.
• [11:06] Can AI be detected reliably? The problem with current “guardrails.”
• [13:23] Introducing Wahini Vara and the “Can you tell?” experiment
• [17:06] Wahini Vara’s experiment: Friends vs. AI
• [22:26] Do errors mark humanity? Broader implications for originality and authenticity
• [25:44] Is AI changing literature—or is our aversion psychological and cultural?

---

6. Conclusion

This episode explores the uncertainty, skepticism, and fundamental questions provoked by AI’s entrance into literature: Are “tells” enough to identify machine-generated art? Does authenticity require a human mind and intention? With both moral dismay and practical anxiety, the publishing industry faces a transformation where lines blur—sometimes unmistakably, sometimes imperceptibly—between the author and the algorithm.

Takeaway:
The AI revolution is here, leaving publishers, authors, and readers alike asking: Is it a bad book, or is it AI? And perhaps more provocatively: If you can’t tell, does it matter?

Transcript

[Noel King]

AI use and allegations of AI use are causing chaos in the publishing industry. Some authors have had their books picked apart and their careers destroyed. AI scandal that is shocking the book industry.

[Narrator/Reader]

If you're wondering if it's AI Slop,

[Imogen West-Knight]

it is AI Slop.

[Wahini Vara]

AI accusations are no fucking joke.

[Noel King]

Some writers say AI is just a tool and they feel no shame about using it.

[Imogen West-Knight]

I'm Carl Hart and I write AI powered romance novels that are topping Amazon charts.

[Noel King]

So is it that AI is soulless and could never replicate what humans do? Or is it pretty compelling? Coming up on Today Explained, a scandal, an experiment and a question. Can books survive the AI revolution? Support for Today explained comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast, but without visibility. It's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. A mess. Service now turns that mess into control. With the AI control tower. You see all your AI across the business in one place. Oh, what it's doing, what it's done, what it's about to do. So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit ServiceNow.com this episode is brought to

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[Noel King]

Butterfly in the sky. I can go twice as high.

[Narrator/Reader]

Take a look.

[Wahini Vara]

It's in a book. AI.

[Noel King]

Imogen West, Knight, journalist, novelist, wrote about a recent massive blow up in the publishing industry for Slate.

[Imogen West-Knight]

So what happened was an author called Mia Ballard, an American author, self published a horror novel called Shy Girl. And the conceit of this book is it is about a woman who is down on her luck financially and decides to sign up for a sugar baby website in the hopes of fixing that. She gets put in touch with this man and enters his orbit and eventually he sort of kidnaps her and decides to keep her as a pet, like a dog in a sort of cage and on a collar. And forbids her from speaking except to say woof and not to woof to actually say woof, which is a bit strange. There we go.

[Narrator/Reader]

This is who I am now. A pet. A shape carved by someone else's hands. A thing devoured piece by piece until there is nothing left but obedience, the quiet and the hurt. Until hurt is all that remains.

[Imogen West-Knight]

During the course of this incarceration, she starts to take on kind of animal qualities and finds herself actually seemingly turning into a dog.

[Narrator/Reader]

I chose the man who wanted not who I was, but who I could become. A pet, a prisoner.

[Imogen West-Knight]

She self publishes this book and it's popular among fans of self published horror online. And then what happened was, as often enough happens these days, is that a big traditional publisher, in this case Hachette, will see a self published novel and see that it's popular and decide to then publish it again under the imprint of their own house. And that can be, that can be a pretty good deal for the house and for the author because they get a book deal and a payment and the publishing house know that people like this book already and therefore it's likely to turn a profit. So they, they do this, they contact her. It then gets published in the UK by Hachette and is slated for publication in the US A little bit later than that. People begin to read this book more widely now that it's out with a major publishing house and discussion begins to pop up on places like booktok. The writing felt really flat. It felt surface level and underdeveloped, which could be a clear sign of AI usage. I was just reading sentences and I

[Chime Disclaimer Voice]

was like, that doesn't even mean anything.

[Narrator/Reader]

And Reddit Shy Girl by Mia Ballard.

[Noel King]

Does anyone else think this was written by ChatGPT?

[Sponsor Narrator]

It has this very recognizable and constant

[Noel King]

rhythmic use of adjectives and similes that stinks of AI.

[Imogen West-Knight]

This conversation kind of gathers speed, people agreeing that there's something kind of off about the book. And then it all gained a little bit more attention. There was a user, a YouTube book person called Frankie's Shelf, who made a three hour long video dissecting this book and all the things that they thought, thought gave the signs of being AI generated.

[Wahini Vara]

It's so empty, it's flat in every way. Themes, characters, plot, writing. And that is because in my opinion, large chunks of this book were written with assistance from a generative AI.

[Imogen West-Knight]

The New York Times then get involved and decide to run their own little investigation into the book, doing things like putting it through AI detective software and take that to Hachette. Hachette then get off their ass, as it were, and pull the book. And then the author, Mia Ballard, has issued very sort of sparse statements about this. She gave a quote to the New York Times saying, you know, that this is essentially ruined her life and her reputation. But the interesting claim that she made was not that there was no AI in the book, but that potentially there was AI in the book because she had hired or asked a third party to edit the book.

[Noel King]

What do we know about the author?

[Imogen West-Knight]

This is her second book. She published another, just self published. And we don't know loads and loads about her because she's very much withdrawn from the public eye in the aftermath of all of this. An extra layer to the narrative around all of this is that she's a black woman and therefore someone who is traditionally less interesting to big publishing houses and is afforded less time and attention. It would be silly to argue that none of the vitriol is linked to the fact that she's a black woman author. You know, I think there's like. One ought to be careful about the way that we talk about this because this is someone from like a. From publishing terms anyway, certainly like a disadvantaged background who's been given this big platform and has attracted like a lot of flack for this potential use of

[Noel King]

AI you read the book, book for your money. What made it so obvious that AI had been used?

[Imogen West-Knight]

There's like two layers to it. There are. Everybody is becoming familiar with certain kinds of AI writing tells, right? There's things like negative parallelisms, that thing where it's like, it's not just this, it's this. Or excessive use of metaphor and similes, especially ones that don't quite make sense or that come very rapidly one after another.

[Narrator/Reader]

Then the door bursts open and he enters like a storm, dragging the sour stink of liquor behind him, his presence filling the room and turning the pastel air brittle. In his hands is a cake gleaming, its pink frosting too smooth, like plastic dipped in sugar, like something that belongs on a screen, too perfect to hold,

[Imogen West-Knight]

every noun having an adjective attached. Certain kind of repetitive syntactical blocks that appear. So there's all of that, There is all of that, but that on its own. You know, AI chatbots write like that because humans did once, you know, like it's an aggregate of all human writing it can get its hands on. So I would kind of think that that on its own isn't quite enough. That's what makes it so difficult, right? Because you can find that in human writing too. But it is. And this will sound wishy washy, but I think people will know what they know. What I mean if they've read large chunks of AI writing is that there's something that happens when you read AI generated text over a long. Like something as long as a novel is that there is just this like spidey sense you get about it, of flatness. It's just. It's very emotionally one note. There's very little variety in the texture of the prose. And yeah, it's a feeling. It's a feeling where you sense literally a lack of mind behind the text.

[Noel King]

So you've been clear that we don't actually know the truth of what happened here. We have an author saying an editor must have inserted AI later on. You understand publishing a lot more than I do. Do you find it believable that that could have happened?

[Imogen West-Knight]

In a way, yes, because, ah, it's possible. I don't think it's possible for it to have happened without her noticing. I think she must have known about it if, if, if, if a third party did. I mean, it sounds obviously, I have no idea. It sounds unlikely that it was done by a third party. If I had to nail my colors to the mask, I would think that probably it would. It was her. Obviously, I have no idea. But that seems like Occam's razor most likely. But then it ought to have been picked up when it went through Hachette. You know, the problem with self publishing to traditional publishing pipeline is that because the book is complete and also because the book has a proven audience already, editors are therefore maybe reasonably, they take the book in and they think, well, not much needs to be done with this because it's a complete work already. You know, it might not be as rigorous an editing process as it would be if just an unpublished first draft came in on an editor's desk. Another is that editors, unfortunately for everybody, including themselves, have less and less time for editing. Like in the major publishing houses. People talk about this all the time within the industry that so much more of their work in recent years has been given over to, you know, stuff that needs doing, like campaign work or liaising with authors. But it is leaving less and less time for them to do the work of editing because the publishing houses don't have enough staff and all these kind of bigger picture issues.

[Noel King]

So where we've ended up here is that readers feel betrayed. A writer's career is more or less destroyed. Hachette looks kind of foolish.

[Imogen West-Knight]

They do.

[Noel King]

It makes you wonder whether anyone is talking about guardrails in place to keep this from happening again or whether at the moment it's just like we've got to wait until the sleuths on Reddit figure out that there's a soullessness to this thing and start asking questions.

[Imogen West-Knight]

I mean that I think everybody is talking about what those guardrails could or should be like. It's a very hot topic I think among editors all over the place. But it's a really tricky1 because AI detection software is the sort of first thing that you might think, okay, well, everything should get run through one of those. Those, when you dig into them, pretty unreliable. Yeah, they're not as good as one might hope. I mean, they'll pick up extremely obvious instances of AI but they may not pick up. They just may not pick up everything. And then you've got this difficult thing. Let's say you have a manuscript from an author and you put that through an AI detection software, and it comes up like 70% likely AI, you know, depends who that is. If this is. If this is an author that you are very keen not to. You know, it's relational stuff. The publishing industry. You don't want to accuse someone of doing something that at the moment, anyway, in the current cultural climate is kind of insulting. Like, did you actually not write this book? Did you get. Did you cheat? You know, that's a really difficult conversation to have unless you're completely sure. And it's really difficult to be completely sure. The thing about AI writing is that it cannot be original in flavor. Like, that's the very nature of it. It's a. Averaging out of everything it can get its hands on. I don't know. I mean, maybe this position will sort of die out, which is depressing to me, but I feel like I would rather read a bad book written by a human than a quote, unquote, good one written by AI because at least you know, to me, to me, what is valuable about a book is it as a piece of art and to know that somebody had, like, something they wanted to say, and maybe they will succeed at that and maybe they will fail. But that, that's. That's the kind of transaction that you enter into with an author. It's like, okay, here's. Here's what I tried to do, like, meet me there with it. But if it's just something that has been churned out by a machine with, like, no love for the. No love for the game, no craft, no intention, then I have no interest in reading that.

[Noel King]

Imogen West Knight is a writer. Coming up, could your closest friends tell the difference between something you wrote and something AI wrote? An author experiments.

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[Noel King]

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[Narrator/Reader]

Take a look. It's in a book.

[Noel King]

Nothing we love more Today explained than a person running an experiment on herself. Wahini Vara Writer, Journalist Author of Searches out in Paperback Now Tell Me Everything

[Wahini Vara]

so I think there's this, I don't know, misconception among writers, among readers, that there is a certain kind of way that AI generates language, and it's super different from the way writers do. And it was seeming to me from some research that I've read and from my own experiences that that was probably not true. So I wanted to do a kind of strange and dramatic thing, which was to see if people who knew my work really well could distinguish between my work and AI generated imitations of my work that were created in a specific way that made them similar to my work. So there's a researcher named Tuhin Chakrabarthi whose work I've covered before, and he had already conducted this experiment. He and colleagues basically trained AI models on the work of established, accomplished writers. And what that means is he basically got the AI model to generate language that looked a lot like language from those authors. And then he had readers who were graduate writing students read those passages generated by AI and also read imitations by fellow graduate writing students and say which one they liked better. And they tended to like the ones by the AI models more than the ones by actual human beings. And so I had him do the same thing with my work, but a twist on it. I had him train an AI model on my previous books, my three previous books on pieces of journalism I've written. And then I had him get his AI model to generate passages sounding like something from a forthcoming novel that I haven't published yet or shared with anyone. And Then I put that alongside passages that I had written. I sent those to people who know my work really well. I'm talking about, like, my best friends since I was 13, writer friends who I've known since I was 19, 20 years old, and I asked if they could tell the difference, and none of them could.

[Noel King]

None. All right, so the people who know you best in the world don't know you that well, apparently. Or AI is exceptionally good at what it is doing. Give me some examples of what happened here. You read me something, maybe that you wrote, and then something that the AI wrote, and let's see if I just met you, but let's see if I can tell any differences.

[Wahini Vara]

It's funny, because I can't remember now which ones are mine and which ones are the AI. Gaia said it seemed to her that we'd been on similar trajectories. We'd both spent many years creating something that we cared deeply about. I with my journalism, she with her startup, and then gone on to focus on empowering others to do the same. She said she'd been surprised to find that mentoring other founders was even more meaningful than running her own startup. In business terms, the ROI was higher. If you are willing to count fulfillment as a return.

[Noel King]

That's nice. I like that. Yeah, that was, I would say, as writing. That was nice. Beginning, middle, end. Lands on a point. I enjoyed it.

[Wahini Vara]

That one was actually AI.

[Noel King]

No.

[Wahini Vara]

Damn, AI.

[Noel King]

AI, you landed in. In such a nice spot. Okay, okay, girl, read me something that you wrote, please.

[Wahini Vara]

Okay, I guess.

[Sponsor Narrator]

Yeah.

[Wahini Vara]

Now we have a spoiler that I'm gonna read you something. From me.

[Imogen West-Knight]

Okay.

[Wahini Vara]

I'd like to argue that we write because we feel compelled to, no matter whether anyone will read them. But is that true? When I was younger, I used to keep a journal for myself. I didn't want anyone else to ever read it, which meant I didn't need to describe the people and places I was writing about or explain why they mattered. When my mom did read my journal in the ninth grade, I considered it the biggest betrayal I'd ever experienced. But the saving grace was knowing that she could not have possibly understood most of what I was writing about. I had an audience of one myself.

[Noel King]

Much better. I liked the AI, but that was obviously.

[Wahini Vara]

Love to say that. I know.

[Noel King]

No, no, actually, you didn't. You didn't. I would be very honest, and I did sort of want to curveball, but that was very pretty. Do me a favor. Read the first two sentences of what you wrote one more time for me.

[Wahini Vara]

I'd like to argue that we write because we feel compelled to, no matter whether anyone will read them, but is that true?

[Noel King]

Wait, we write. What is the them referring to?

[Wahini Vara]

It's an error. It's a grammatical error on my part.

[Noel King]

Look at me. Okay, so.

[Wahini Vara]

And good job catching it, because.

[Noel King]

Thank you.

[Wahini Vara]

A lot of people assumed that one was AI And I think the best indication that it was actually me is that there is that grammatical error, because AI wouldn't have made a grammatical error like that.

[Noel King]

This is the thing that I would like us to talk about. AI does not make mistakes. And in the first half of the show, we. Our guest, also a writer, described AI as kind of soulless. And I think that was part of what she was pointing to. What you read me by the AI wasn't bad. It sort of seemed like something that I might read in, like. Like lean in. Right? You enjoy mentoring other people. I'm gonna hear why. So question for you. When all this was said and done, people could not tell what was you. People who know you well couldn't tell what was you and what was AI what did you feel about that? Did you feel threatened? Did you feel suspicious of your friends and family?

[Wahini Vara]

You know, I was of two minds because on the one hand, and I didn't feel threatened, but I found myself questioning my own assumption about myself, which is that I identify as a writer who is very invested in originality, who really wants every new book to be completely different from the previous books. And so the fact that this AI was trained on my previous books and could predict the style of the writing in the new book suggested that I wasn't as original as I thought, that my new book wasn't as different from the previous books as I thought. And at the same time, on the other hand, I actually felt vindicated because I disagree with the other author, who is your previous guest, about the soullessness of AI generated text. I don't think that AI generated text is, by definition, easily distinguishable from human text because of a kind of soullessness inherent in the text.

[Noel King]

Okay, but can most readers tell that something is AI versus something written by a human?

[Wahini Vara]

It seems like they can't, and I can't myself. And this actually gets back to what we were discussing earlier about the question of whether AI generated text is convincing or soulless. And I think the reason a lot of people assume AI writing is going to sound soulless is that AI companies, in their most recent versions of their products, have created these products that are specifically designed to sound a certain way Like a certain kind of corporate customer service speak kind of way. And so people think that's just what AI sounds like, right? Like that's somehow inherently the way AI sounds. But it's not true. AI can sound any number of ways. So it's technically very easy actually to build an AI to train an AI model that sounds human, like even literary. The reason we're not that familiar with it is that that's not what the products look like currently.

[Noel King]

So ultimately, do you think AI is going to end up changing our relationship to literature, or do you think everybody who reads is going to be as skeptical and skeeved out as you and I are?

[Wahini Vara]

Well, research shows not only that in some cases people prefer AI generated text to human generated text, but also that if they're told that a piece of text is AI generated, they become uninterested in it. And so it seems clear that people in general, the reading public, does not want to read text generated by AI if they know that it's generated by AI. You know, I think we focus a lot on this human technology binary, on like, oh, it's weird if a machine creates the language, but I think a big part of it is that we want to be communicating with one another. We don't want to be receiving our art from enormous tech companies that have a lot of wealth and have a lot of power and want to control us. Right? So for me, it's really about do we want to communicate with other people or do we want to receive text from enormous technology companies?

[Noel King]

Wahini Vara, writer, journalist, contributor to BusinessWeek and the Atlantic and the New Yorker. Her book Searches is out in paperback. Kelly Wessinger produced today's show and is the voice of Shy Girl. Amina El Saadi edited Gabriel Donatov checked the facts and David Tadashore and Bridger Dunnigan, engineer. I'm Noel King. It's Today, explained.

[Wahini Vara]

Sam.