A literary A.I. scandal arrives (This week in books)

This week! Books!

I’m back! For real this time! And what a dizzying few weeks it’s been while I globetrotted.

As a writer, blogger, newsletter-er, and editor/consultant helping other writers, it feels like the ground’s shifting under my feet very, very fast. Artificial Intelligence is unleashing massive changes, and it’s daunting to make sense of it all.

To wit:

Was a Story That Just Won a Literary Prize A.I.-Generated? – Valeriya Safronova, New York Times – LLMs Are Revealing How Low the Bar Is (And Lowering It Even Further) – Lincoln Michel, Counter Craft / This Literary AI Scandal Changes Everything – Vauhini Vara, The Atlantic – In an inevitable harbinger of the future, we have our first major literary prize A.I. scandal. A story written by a self-professed A.I. enthusiast with all the hallmarks of A.I. writing won a prestigious prize from Granta. This is naturally spawning a great deal of hand-wringing across the writing world.

In the absence of reliable A.I.-detection tools and proof of guilt, I personally think we have more to fear from A.I. vigilante witch hunts and false accusations (which will disproportionately affect idiosyncratic and already-marginalized writers) than we do from writers incorporating A.I. into their writing or even using it whole cloth. I’m more inclined to agree with Lincoln Michel in the post above, who critiques the story itself. The writing is really bad in the story in question, so why did it win in the first place?

My hunch, for better or worse, is that this is going to eventually shake out in a place where we’re going to stop caring whether A.I. was used to write a story any more than we care whether it was written on a laptop or a typewriter. We’ll instead get back to assessing whether a story is actually any good. I think it’s a shame writers are taking these shortcuts and not simply using their own brains and exploring their own humanity, but I don’t see the wisdom in chasing ghosts in a vain attempt to enforce the unenforceable.

Curious to hear your thoughts here!

Google’s AI search overhaul is great for Google and bad for everyone who makes the web worth searching – Alina Maria Stan, The Next Web / Is the web being summarized to death? – Casey Newton, Platformer – Meanwhile, Google is overhauling its search engine to lean even more into A.I. explainers, which is tremendously unsettling for people like yours truly, who have long relied upon Google search to find new readers, community members, and clients. How is anyone going to find this blog if Google’s A.I. simply serves up my advice without attributing/linking it to me and the other publishing experts like me?

Tech writer Casey Newton peers into the future and worries that even our inboxes will be ruthlessly and arbitrarily summarized by A.I. to the point that people won’t even read individual newsletters, and writers will struggle even more to build direct relationships with their readers. It feels like my whole community and business model is about to be ripped to shreds by A.I. summaries, which is just a tad unsettling! Where’s a functioning government when you need one.

Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I. – Benjamin Mullin, New York Times – You can’t make it up. A book on truth in our A.I. world contains A.I. hallucinated quotes.

The AI Revolution Hollywood Feared Is Already Happening — in India – Justin Rao, Patrick Brzeski, The Hollywood Reporter – And for a look into where we could be headed with A.I. content creation, India’s film industry is hurtling headfirst into the A.I. future, with all the attendant possibilities and headaches.

Watch Out For This Scam Impersonating Editors at Major Publishing Houses – Victoria Strauss, Writer Beware – Meanwhile, publishing scams are proliferating like never before, and I want to re-up this post from Writer Beware about a bait and switch that tons of writers are falling for. There are also currently scammers impersonating me, referring writers to a fake literary agent. Please reach out to me directly through my site if you’re ever confused about whether you’re really corresponding with me.

In happier news, congrats to the Pulitzer Prize winners for books:

• Fiction – Angel Down by Daniel Kraus
• History – We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution by Jill Lepore
• Biography – Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution by Amanda Vaill
• Memoir or Autobiography – Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li
• Poetry – Ars Poeticas by Juliana Spahr
• General Nonfiction – There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone

Anthropic Settlement: Did Your Publisher Fail to Register Your Copyright? – Authors Guild – Many publishers (including mine) neglected to register the copyright for some or all of their books, often in violation of their contracts, which meant they were ineligible for money from the Anthropic settlement. The Authors Guild is soliciting information from authors to try to scope the extent of the problem.

Appeals Court Denies Petition to Rehear Book Ban Case – Nathalie op de Beeck, Publishers Weekly – In devastating news on book banning, an appeals court declined to rehear a case on an Iowa law that led to the removal of hundreds of books from schools and libraries.

The Secret to Success Is ‘Monotasking’ (gift link) – David Epstein, The Atlantic – Good things come from uninterrupted concentration.

People Are Paying $1,000 to Read Among Strangers (gift link) – Alice Robb, Bloomberg – Curated reading excursions are becoming big business.

The Kind of Short Stories People Really Want to Read – Isaac Kolding, Amateur Criticism – Reddit’s wildly popular “Am I the Asshole” posts are arguably the most popular short story format in the world and offer a window into what the people want, for better or worse.

The Children’s Middle-Grade Slump: How Bad Is It? – Jane Friedman – How bad is the situation for middle grade fiction, i.e. novels for 8-12 year olds? Super bad unless you’re a literary estate, because the classics are soaking up the sales.

Consider The Sister – Lindsey Adler, Defector – David Foster Wallace’s sister Amy has a complicated and wrenching role maintaining his memory.

Granta Says They Weren’t Involved in Selecting That Short Story / Why Is Book Threads So Unhinged? – Jasmine Vojdani, Book Gossip – More on the Granta scandal, but also a look into the raging world of Book Threads, which seems uniquely organized around surfacing the most unhinged posts imaginable.

The Award-Winning Novelist Who’s Under Fire for Simply Depicting an Israeli – Laura Miller, Slate – Speaking of, author R.F. Kuang has been under fire in certain sectors of social media merely for including an Israeli character in her unreleased new novel, which few people have even read yet. Perhaps in a sign of industry maturation, rather than Kuang or her publisher panicking like others have in the past, they seem to just be laying low until things die down.

Why the Best Writing Advice Is Often the Weirdest – David O’Neill, The New Yorker – A lovely survey of the complicated world of writing advice and what writers (and advice givers) need and want.

This week in bestsellers

Here are the top five NY Times bestsellers in a few key categories. (All links are affiliate links):

Adult print and e-book fiction:

1. A Parade of Horribles by Matt Dinniman
2. Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
3. Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
4. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
5. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Adult print and e-book nonfiction:

1. Suicidal Empathy by Gad Saad
2. Strangers by Belle Burden
3. Take Me To Your Leader by Neil deGrasse Tyson
4. The Case for America by Brett Baier
5. Famesick by Lena Dunham

Young adult hardcover:

1. The Escape Game by Marissa Meyer and Tamara Moss
2. Release Me by Tahereh Mafi
3. Fake Skating by Lynn Painter
4. Change of Plans by Sarah Dessen
5. If Only I Had Told Her by Laura Nowlin

Middle grade hardcover:

1. Operation Trick Shot by Dude Perfect with Allan Woodrow
2. Wonder by R.J. Palacio
3. Wombat Waiting by Katherine Applegate
4. KPop Demon Hunters by Jessica Yoon
5. Unsettling Salad! by Aaron Reynolds

This week on the blog

In case you missed them, here are this week’s posts:

This week on the blog

In case you missed them, here are this week’s posts:

• N/A

And keep up with the discussion in all the places!

• Follow me on Bluesky and Threads
• Check out the Bransforums

And finally:

Signed, Sealed, Delivered – Lauren Collins, The New Yorker – A very fun ode to messages in a bottle and the people who are obsessed with them.

Have a great weekend!

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