An author’s $2 million book deal was pulled over suspected AI use. Where does publishing go from here?

Three writers jump in a Google doc to discuss the fallout from this most recent literary scandal and debate the future of the industry in the shadow of AI

Illustration by Mia Wu

Last week, news broke that Jerry Falade’s debut crime novel, which had reportedly sold for $2 million after a 14-way bidding auction, had been pulled from publication by the author’s own agents over suspected AI use.

In an email to publishers, one of his representatives wrote: “Jerry Falade produced an incredible manuscript that dazzled us and the top publishing professionals around the world. Unfortunately, we are no longer able to authenticate how the manuscript fully evolved from origin to completion. During the submission process we vetted the manuscript with Jerry for AI and felt trusting in his reassurance that it was written without utilising AI as a resource in the writing or editorial process. We can no longer substantiate that, and we are withdrawing the book.”

This is at least the third such public instance of AI allegations leveled against an author this year alone, preceded by Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl, which was pulled from publication, and H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth, which was initially self-published and, as of now, is still set to be distributed by Simon & Schuster in a seven-figure deal.

Falade, who has now obtained legal counsel, has vehemently denied the accusations. In a statement sent out to several press organizations, he wrote, “Three Black authors received major publishing deals this year, and all three later had deals cancelled or disrupted following suspicions about AI. There seems to be a troubling assumption that when a Black writer produces work that attracts significant attention, the work could not possibly be their own. Meanwhile, there are popular white writers who have publicly mentioned using AI for their writing processes and they’re still doing fine.” On Instagram, Falade has posted snippets of texts and emails from 2021, prior to the advent of ChatGPT, about his book to show he didn’t use AI to write it.

One way or another, it’s clear the publishing industry is in a state of flux, if not panic, over both the growing use of generative AI in literature and accusations of its use. We’ve asked three industry professionals and writers—Kathleen Schmidt, Lincoln Michel, and John Paul Brammer—to weigh in on how scandals like these keep erupting, if AI use has any place in writing to begin with, and where publishing might go from here.

Kathleen is the president of KMSPR, a strategy, marketing, PR, and branding firm focusing on authors, publishers, and publishing-adjacent entities. Lincoln is an author, editor, and professor of fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. John Paul is an author and columnist.

There have been a few big publishing scandals involving AI recently, with Jerry Falade’s debut crime novel, which reportedly sold for over $2 million in a bidding war, most recently pulled by its own agents for suspected AI use. Falade has obtained a lawyer and is seemingly denying the allegations. What were your knee-jerk reactions to hearing the news?

Kathleen Schmidt: My first reaction was, “Oh no, not again.” It was the third such allegation in a short period of time, but the stakes were much higher. A 14-way auction that results in a big advance is nothing to scoff at. When the agents pulled the book, my immediate thought was to find out more about what happened. My second thought was, “How could this happen?” AI allegations had just been put forth in an Atlantic piece about Daggermouth, a self-published book that Scarlett Press (Simon & Schuster) just published—that resulted in a 60% score of AI from Pangram. It was worrisome that we were hearing about another possible case of AI writing so quickly.

John Paul Brammer: My first thought was, “$2 million? I need to write a crime novel.” It’s always wonderful to learn that there is in fact money in publishing, it’s just that I’m not getting it. My second thought, similar to Kathleen’s, was, “Again?” I haven’t read the text, so I’m not at liberty to discuss whether or not it was AI-generated, but I doubt the agents would have surrendered such a payday if there wasn’t something going on there.

Lincoln Michel: My first reaction was “Welp. About time.” I think everyone in the publishing industry has been expecting a big scandal like this for a while. Agents and editors have, I think, been very worried they’d be at the center of a scandal. The fact that the agents themselves recalled this novel surprised me. This wasn’t the publisher getting cold feet. The agents were giving up a huge chunk of money. This makes me assume there’s some there there. However, I do not want to judge an author who is denying and whose work I haven’t read. Unlike other recent AI allegations, the text isn’t out there for us to judge.

How could this have happened? If the allegations are true, the manuscript exchanged many hands and was read several times over by different teams. It seems an internal system of checks and balances failed here.

KS: The problem is that the checks and balances in publishing really come down to an editor and agent’s experience and gut checks. As we have seen with some memoir scandals, there is no fact-checking in publishing. Likewise, there is no uniform policy on checking a manuscript for AI. I was confounded by the fact that 14 different editors had the manuscript that resulted in a bidding war. If the book “dazzled” as the agents have claimed but also had “hallmarks of AI,” it makes me question the entire process. I can’t comment on the book’s merits because I haven’t read it, but it is notable that so many people in the industry jumped in to bid on it. Overall, I think it is becoming more difficult to detect AI. It’s also a risky business to start accusing authors of using it when we depend on something like Pangram, which is not infallible.

I agree with Lincoln that publishers should be conducting LLM training. It is one step in the right direction.

JP: Well, I thought about the Commonwealth short-story prize fiasco/Granta dustup from not too long ago, and I guess what depresses me is that I have to assume there’s a lack of rigorous reading happening among people who should be able to catch this kind of prose. What bothers me most about AI in literature is that, as much as I would love to blame Big Tech, what’s being exposed here is that we don’t have a robust literary culture. The people who are judging these things (I believe, however, that they stood by the Commonwealth story? I’ll check), are awarding this kind of prose, which, whether it was AI-generated or not, is troubling to me. I don’t think the average person needs to be reading Proust in their spare time or whatever, but the fact that the people in our culture who should be discerning readers are being proven time and again to be undiscerning makes me worried about the future of literature. AI is only accelerating and revealing it.

LM: Like the others, I don’t want to judge this book, since we haven’t read it. However, the initial Publishers Lunch article by Erin Somers reported what I’ve heard myself: Many imprints have had to pull books or get authors to rewrite them because of LLM use. They just haven’t made the news. It’s more widespread than many realize. How can it happen? Well, LLMs are really good at evading our current systems. I get several AI emails each day past my spam filter. Every professor I know can tell you they get work that is also likely AI but gets past TurnItIn. It’s tricky.

But also… I’m not sure most people in publishing have studied LLM tics and learned to spot it. They have, perhaps naively, relied on the integrity of the author they work with. You can learn how to spot this stuff, not in every case but in many. I expect publishers will be doing LLM training at some point. Hell, probably everyone (annoyingly) who deals with text or images of any kind in any field will need it.

JP, you mentioned these literary awards are being handed out to potentially AI-generated/assisted prose. Do you think that’s a taste/skill issue in the judging process, or is what we see as “good” literature changing in the age of AI?

JP: A skill issue for sure! Look, I don’t mean to say I can’t be fooled. I’m sure I have been. But for me, it’s usually pretty obvious when I read something that has that AI-affected prose. It seems to me that AI does have a certain libido for a certain style, and for certain techniques. There’s this corny animism everywhere. The bench that watches. The rock that remembers. Etc.

What do you make of the agents themselves pulling the book? They’ll be experiencing a pretty big pay cut themselves.

KS: I think it was a complicated decision. Giving up a $300K commission is not easy, but they clearly had their reasons, most of which allegedly have to do with communication with the author about his suspected AI use. Since we haven’t read the book, it is hard to say what specifically set off alarms. What is notable to me is how public the agents have been about this. It makes me uncomfortable because confidentiality is being broken, and many of their statements struck me as them simply saving face. From what I understand, an editor first noted that they thought AI was used. Then Publishers Lunch ran the manuscript through Pangram. They shouldn’t even have had the manuscript at that point. I think the agents’ reputations may take a hit in this case.

JP: Girl, that’s so much money… It does make me wonder what’s going on behind the scenes. Imagine those emails. I get stressed just thinking about them. What I would say is it feels like we’re in a Wild West with this stuff. It’s all so case-by-case.

LM: I will say I think it is smart for literary publishers/agents/etc. to take stands here. I’ve always thought the real issue with LLMs in publishing is quantity. They can pump out endless slop. This slop is already overwhelming things like Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited store. I also think we’ll see people turn to customizable LLM slop, paying OpenAI or whatever directly for stories. So I think literary publishers would be smart to make themselves a home for the people who want human-authored work.

This is new territory—deal cancellations on account of suspected AI use—but what might happen to Falade, and other authors in his boat, from here? Is his career stalled? Thwarted? Or will he, and those who have been accused before him, be just fine?

JP: I would not be fine if I lost out on millions of dollars, but that’s just me. I don’t know what will happen in his case, and I probably won’t read the book if and when it comes out (for forensic purposes, I’d probably crack it open, I suppose). But I imagine there will be more cases like this in the near future. I’m against generative AI in literature, but I also recognize things are reaching a fever pitch where people on all sides are struggling to be rational. Yes, I bet some people really will get falsely accused, and while I can’t know if that’s what’s happening here, we do need to start thinking about, like… what happens when someone is innocent but becomes the subject of intense public scrutiny? I worry about that.

LM: Yeah, I can’t even imagine what the author is going through, especially if the accusations are false. I think this could go any way, though. If he can prove authorship, I imagine some big publisher might be interested. Hell, I can imagine some would take a chance just because of the free publicity of the scandal. Getting coverage is the biggest problem for books these days…

KS: I think Jerry Falade should self-publish the book ASAP. That is what I would advise him to do. However, yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that he has now retained a lawyer, so this is about to get very interesting. Conversely, in the case of Daggermouth, Scarlett Press just acquired additional titles from the author, so they are clearly standing by her. I also think we can’t discuss the fallout without noting that the accused are all authors of color. That is a problem in itself that must be addressed.

JP, you mentioned it a bit already, but I’d love to hear all your perspectives on AI in publishing in general. The industry, and readers alike, seem to be rejecting its use, even as an editing tool. Is there any room for it in literature at all?

LM: A problem with any discussion of “AI” is the term is vague and applies to many different technologies, and the uses of a given tech are so wide. I think everyone can agree there’s a vast gulf between using an LLM as a spellchecker and having it churn out a book for you in 45 minutes, as the romance author profiled by the NYT claimed to do. I think the standards will shake out in some way. Even if the legality and such remain murky, some standards for artistic integrity will shake out.

Also… if you use AI in significant ways and are open about it, great! Readers can judge with their eyes and dollars. The problem is that very few such people want to admit what they are doing. That’s the root of all these scandals, really. It’s all the people hiding or lying about their use.

JP: I do think we’re heading to a place where to use technology at all is to use AI. When I do a Google search, it’s Gemini answering. I know some people who are finding ways to abstain, but candidly I’m probably not going to go out of my way to practice absolute nonparticipation. It’s also a funny, paranoid era we’re in, where it feels like everyone suspects each other in some way. Like, Okay, but you use it for X, Y, or Z… right? The Hank Green thing, for example. He basically said he was using it for research, but there are people out there calling for his head on a spike over it. It all feels random and emotional. Which, that was the internet before Claude or ChatGPT… so…

I agree with Lincoln. The lack of transparency is making people act up.

KS: I don’t think we can have absolutes about AI right now, but I do think there needs to be very clear guidelines, and that publishers must come together to create them. It is not a secret that publishers have begun using AI internally. To what extent, I don’t know, but if publishers are using it, they need to be clear about how. I myself use Claude Cowork in my day-to-day because it assists me with administrative tasks like contracts, invoices, and status updates. What we need are differentiators: it is okay to use AI for X, but not Y. The problem, of course, is that you will always have people who use these tools for nefarious reasons. That is my worry with Pangram: You have an AI-detection tool open to the public. They can run anything through it and receive a false positive. What if that happens to an author, who is then publicly blamed, but the accusations are untrue? This is very tricky territory.

Personally, I hate that Google uses Gemini as search results. It really has ruined search, which is a whole other discussion.

JP: There’s a little Gemini sparkle thing in this very Google doc. It showed up for me yesterday, and I don’t know what it wants. I really am an abuelita when it comes to technology, for better and for worse. Like, what happens when I press it? Did I consent to it being here? Basically: I just don’t know if I’m vigilant enough to keep AI at bay from all aspects of my daily life. Someone smart will probably say, “You can disable that by clicking this, then that, etc.!” But I, like most people, am kind of lazy.

How has AI in general changed literature? Or even just your personal approach to literature? Based on what you guys are saying, it seems to be in a state of flux/chaos deciding what to make of it. Is this change in line with what you expected even a year or two ago?

LM: I’m tempted to say… it hasn’t really? It’s obviously caused lots of angst, think pieces, and discourse. There have been a few scandals. But if we’re talking about traditionally published books at least, I don’t think if you walked into a bookstore today and bought 25 new releases and compared them to 25 new releases from five years ago, you’d notice a difference. LLMs have failed to produce any new genre or styles. There hasn’t been some bestseller written by AI that changed how books are published. This may change. As of now, it’s more of a looming threat.

I’m also a professor, and that is a situation where LLMs have changed everything, almost entirely for the worse for everyone. The way assignments are made. How they are graded. How classes operate. The paranoia from both professors and students. It’s a full-on crisis. Nothing like that in publishing yet.

KS: I agree with Lincoln here—AI hasn’t really changed literature. That said, I think what people forget is what consumers want. If we look at the bestseller list, historically, most of the books on it are not great literary works. They are books that the masses read. What does that mean? Well, it could mean that those with less discerning taste could be easily fooled by an AI-written book. That is my concern. We’ve already seen a large swath of the public buy into misinformation when it comes to current events. That tells me a lot about how much AI could affect the book world, especially in nonfiction. It’s a slippery slope we are on, and I feel the industry is in a crisis.

JP: Echoing my esteemed colleagues here to say I’m not sure it has. A lot of literature of the recent past, at least the ones that make it to “the discourse,” gives “warm-blooded LLM.” But yeah, I have concerns! My basic thing is that we have a culture that defines “writer” not as something you do, but as something you produce. Writing should be in the doing. The laboring over small choices on the sentence level. A lot of people think that “writer” is an identity they are being gatekept from by dastardly effort. People feel this way about a lot of things. Technology exists to reduce effort. So I suppose what I’m concerned about is just… the volume of it all. There’s going to be so, so much of it.

LM: Piggybacking on those concerns, I’m honestly less worried about AI-assisted artists than fully automated AI entertainment displacing human art. By that, I mean I could easily see a future where many people pay a subscription to, say, a Disney-GPT partnership (which was sort of in the works with Sora before OpenAI shut it down) to get AI-generated Harry Potter stories or AI-generated Star Wars clips. Maybe you pay extra to get Yoda fighting Voldemort. The focus in most of the media has been on AI quality. I think quantity is the threat. It can produce endless customizable work for very cheap. If AI capabilities improve as all the boosters claim, then why do you need a human there at all? If an LLM can produce a book that’s 95% as good as your average commercial thriller, how many people care about that last 5%? Some will. Many won’t.

If some authors are increasingly interested in or are fully using generative AI to write entire books, what does that say about publishing as a whole? Are we, as a society or industry, pushing writers to produce more than they’re humanly capable of?

KS: It has less to do with publishing as a whole and more to do with what consumers will buy. Let’s take Kindle Unlimited, for example. Do I think there is a lot of AI slop there? Yes. Do I think a lot of people are reading it? Maybe. I think we have to look at the industry’s output as a whole. Generally speaking, the books that sell the most are largely for consumption and not so much for absorption. It’s very much like the film industry. A superhero movie is very different from an Oscar-contending indie film. Book publishing is not that different.

LM: Kathleen’s point is key. Some people act like publishing should equal great books. But publishing equals all books published in all styles and genres. Some editors and imprints are focused on what we might call great art, but others are looking for highly formulaic work that will sell. We shouldn’t be shocked that low-quality bestsellers exist anymore than bland blockbusters or dull reality TV shows. If something sells, industries will put it out.

JP: There’s literature as an industry and there’s literature as a calling, of course, and anyone who embraces the latter probably has a built-in cynicism pertaining to the former. I think it’s always been the case that, if you want to be a bestseller, there are certain shortcuts you can take, sacrifices to your vision and all that. Sorry if it’s a bit woo-woo, but if you know why you’re writing, it does exempt you from a lot of this stuff. As for the mass market, what people are buying, yeah, AI is going to go to town there. Like Kathleen said, publishers pick up subpar literature regularly.

LM: A few years ago, Clarkesworld and some other big science fiction magazines got inundated with AI submissions. They eventually traced the flood back to TikTok “side hustle” accounts that told followers they could make “easy money” submitting AI science fiction stories (every SF writer I know laugh-cried at the idea there’s lots of money in SFF short stories, but I digress). My point is that a lot of the “AI authors” are not actually people who care about writing at all. Many are just some form of scammers or spammers trying to get easy money. So I’m not sure it says that much about publishing per se except that it remains for many prestigious and aspirational to many, and also resented. Every author can tell you about having co-workers, family members, or random strangers say something like “I’ve always wanted to write a novel but I never had time, working in the real world!” or else asking you for advice on “getting published quickly.”

I want to note that I do think some authors are using LLMs in artistically ambitious ways. Universally, though, they say the process takes as much time as writing without LLMs. That’s obviously not the appeal for most people.

It’s interesting to me, as a writer, that so many people want to call themselves writers nowadays, especially when there’s so much fearmongering that reading and literacy is dead. What do you make of that? Is this just a fad?

JP: It always struck me as odd that the tech types on social media who champion gen AI demand to be called “artists.” Like, I thought you guys were ruthlessly practical and results-oriented? Who cares what anyone calls you, if you have the product? But what’s interesting is that, no, it’s not all about the results for these types! They want the identity of “artist” or “writer.” It’s a spiritual thing for them, no less than it is for us. In my opinion, this phenomenon has a deep pedigree that would take too long to get into here. The concept of the authentic, inner self, which is invariably some kind of artist. They don’t read or write, but they’re “writers”! It has something to say about how we approach identity generally, and the thin membrane between contemporary identity and… marketing demographic, I guess. For me, it’s pushed me to locate my identity more in the doing than in the producing. I think a “real writer,” if there is such a thing, has an obligation first and foremost to be a “real reader” today. Be a reader before you’re a writer!

KS: As I wrote in my newsletter last week, it is really about the idea of wanting to be known for something. Many, many people romanticize the idea of being an author. They think you can get rich from publishing books. What they don’t understand is that writing is a craft that people work at for years. AI undervalues that notion, and I don’t think non-writers quite understand that having an idea for a book and writing a book are two very different things. I have ideas for fiction books all the time, but I don’t write fiction, so they stay in my head or in a notebook. Someone else might take those ideas, plug them into an LLM, and get a book out of it. To me, that kills so much of why I was an English Lit major and why I have dedicated my career to book publishing. If some of those same people read literary fiction, they might better understand that it is not so easy to write a good book.

LM: I have always found it a bit odd how many people think they can easily be professional writers in a way they don’t about other art forms. People don’t say, “Oh, I could be an opera star if I just made a little time” or “Everyone has a blueprint for a skyscraper inside them.” I think a lot of it comes down to the technical skills of writing (typing on a laptop, grammar, etc.) seeming to be things everyone learns in school. There’s more to it than that, from my POV! But everyone does write something, even if it’s just texts or emails. It’s easier to fantasize that you could easily write a novel than that you could pick up a guitar and play a killer heavy metal solo or sculpt a great statue with no training. Plus, the supplies are cheap compared to, say, film equipment. But yes, it is a lot harder than it looks!

There seems to be a rumbling, looming worry from authors online, especially with stories like Falade’s in mind, that they might be accused of using AI when they haven’t. Are you seeing that worry in your own work? What about other writers you speak with?

JP: I was concerned when I saw the Substack x Pangram thing. I thought, what if it says my work was AI-generated? I don’t use AI in my writing, but I don’t love the idea of entrusting that fact to Pangram. I guess I’m also just thinking, I don’t want a big chunk of my writing career to be so defined in relation to AI. It feels like those of us who don’t use it have some obligation to talk about it all the time, or to change our styles, to react. It reminds me of Peak Twitter in a way, where there was this giant Eyeball constantly over my work. It’s not good for a writer to feel that way, I think. Even outside of false accusations, which I’m sure will be an issue, there’s the problem of this looming shadow over everything.

KS: I am not crazy about the public having access to Pangram, and I have been very vocal about it. Pangram is getting a lot of free publicity, which helps their funding rounds. We can’t ignore that. There is so much jealousy in the writing world that it is inevitable that people will start falsely accusing authors of using AI. I am not hearing fear from authors I work with, but every now and then, I receive a response from media I’ve pitched asking me if the pitch was AI. It is insulting. We are in a precarious position right now, and I do worry for authors who put in the work. I also worry that journalists who cover the industry are looking for too many “gotcha!” moments that will give them clicks.

I am about to begin writing a book, and yes, I am nervous, but I also have confidence in my writing and will back it up with notes and drafts. That is where things are right now. Authors need their receipts.

JP: To Kathleen’s point, I’ve already seen on social media people quote-sharing essays with some version of “it’s giving AI.” There’s definitely a burgeoning social technology of paranoia and accusations. As fractured as social media is right now, it remains one of the few ways for new writers to be discovered. Weren’t there already enough booby traps in that temple? Yeesh.

LM: It’s all very depressing, and I hate the idea that authors will have to prove their work and have readers skeptically poring over their “evidence” and lobbing accusations on social media without any real proof. (Again, as a professor, I’ve seen how much damage it has done to trust and everything else for professors and students.)

I guess all I can say is that I blame primarily the tech companies, who released these programs without any thought about how they could damage various fields. And secondarily, I blame the AI authors who don’t disclose their use. We wouldn’t be having these problems if everyone were open about it, and the reason they aren’t open about it is because readers have so far been rejecting LLM books. So they lie or hide it to try and basically trick readers. I’m sure they have mental justifications for it, but it still is what it is.

Where do we go from here? AI, both generative and otherwise, seems like it’s here to stay, though its role, if any at all, in reading and writing is still undefined. Publishing and literature is not a monolith, but if you had to make an educated guess, what happens next? What will the industry look like in five years?

KS: Publishing companies need to form an alliance and create uniform AI policies. It can’t be that one publishing house does it one way and another does it differently. The only way to move into the future is to create universal guidelines and provide training. The industry is frustrating in that it is slow to adapt. I really feel we’ve reached an inflection point with AI, so change is necessary, but I also know too much about how the industry works to be overly optimistic.

JP: Standards. Rules. Norms. Those will probably get ossified somewhat. I’ve never known a “healthy” publishing industry, so in some ways my expectations are in a healthy place, I believe. I try not to get too into predictions or anxiety. I have my notebook that I’m scribbling in, and a pile of books to read, and that, to me, is “my job.” All sorts of wacky shenanigans are possible in this industry.

LM: I expect we’ll see a bit of everything. Some segments of readers will be happy to prompt their own LLM outputs without humans involved. Others will be fine paying for “AI-assisted” work. And others—I suspect the majority—will seek out human-authored texts and human-made art, even if they’re fine with LLM use for other things like Google Search or a calendar app. I suspect no one will ever like being tricked, though, and authors who lie about LLM use and get caught will cause scandals. That won’t change.

You’ve all discussed the industry at large, but how do you all feel in your own, personal writing practices at this moment?

JP: I’m buying low on “being literate.” I’ve written about this before, but I do think it’s an exciting time to be a reader and a writer. Reading has a heroic valence to it in the LLM era. Imagine that! You’re fighting the system by reading a book. You’re a prodigy for “using your own words.” I love when the bar is in hell. I’ll say this, at least. My writing is getting weirder. I’m getting into literature that I’m not sure I would have found if I wasn’t reading so many books right now, and I don’t think I’d be reading so many books if my understanding of “writer” hadn’t changed in opposition to all these Big Tech moves. Twitter dying. AI slop everywhere. In a calmer world, I’m still writing essays with the goal of being screenshotted for Twitter, and I’m glad things fell apart enough for me to stop doing that. Consolation prizes abound.

KS: I feel good about my writing, because I know that I am capable, and I am not trying to be any other kind of writer than who I am. Meaning, I am not trying to write the next Great American Novel when I know I write nonfiction. I exercise my writing muscle by publishing a newsletter once per week, which I love. I’ve also been reading a lot of great debut literary fiction lately, which makes me a bit optimistic. Here’s the thing: Before AI, there were still terrible books being published. That will still happen. There are still a great number of people who recognize good writing, and thank goodness for that.

I am also in grad school for a second master’s, and researching/writing papers is something I enjoy doing. Writing means you are constantly building a muscle in your brain. Too many people don’t realize that. There is truly nothing like the satisfaction of writing your own work and it being well-received. I don’t think someone using AI for all of their writing can feel that way. I imagine that is more of a “getting away with it” feeling, which is sad.

LM: Being a writer or an artist of any type—hell, being a person of any type—is not merely about the end point. I don’t write because it’s an easy path to wealth and riches. I write fiction because—I’m paraphrasing my friend and author Helen Phillips here—it’s my favorite thing to do with my brain. I want to expand my own skills, explore my own thoughts, and produce work that only I could create. LLMs have little appeal for me there, outside of perhaps some rote functions like a better spellcheck. Outsourcing your thinking to LLMs risks degrading one’s skills and making your work more impersonal.

What’s the point there? Even if an LLM could write a Lincoln Michel novel that was as good or better than one I write… so what? I didn’t write it. I didn’t learn anything from it. It isn’t mine. Many people treat LLMs like ghostwriters. I also would not hire a ghostwriter to write my work. I became a writer because I like writing. The appeal is in the act itself.

Anything else you want to talk about before we close?

JP: I’m thinking a lot about how this is all impacting young writers. I have my career because of Twitter. I went to state school in Oklahoma. Twitter was an open door to talk to editors, and to pitch. Plus, there was this media apparatus in place to scoop up young writers and supply them with $300 in exchange for a byline and a story about the worst thing that ever happened to them. It had problems, yes, and a lot of the issues we’re discussing today seem logical extensions of those same problems. But what is in place for young writers today to be discovered, and how are they navigating LLMs? I suppose, entering “wizened hermit” mode, I would tell them that writing should hurt. It should be hard. There’s only growth when there’s struggle. But as for how to make a living out of it, well, there’s never really been an easy answer on that front. Community is one answer. I’ve been heartened to see more zines and alt lit scenes popping up with a DIY vibe.

I guess I would also say, on the optimistic side: The best writers have always been something apart. The best writers don’t play by the rules. No one can decide what time or culture they inherit. But the most interesting artists make something of it. They transcend it, and widen the scope of what’s possible. To that end, no, I don’t think the next genius of our time is going to be a prompt expert. Well, I hope not, anyway. Egad…

Lastly, I’ve noticed that writers are doing more and more in-person things. Maybe that’s because I, personally, keep throwing parties for them. But it’s fun, and I feel more connected to other writers now than I ever did than when we were all in the same “digital town square.” Play at salon culture! Be pretentious together! It’s a lot more fun than calling each other out on Threads or whatever.

LM: I’m with JP that I do fear for younger writers. I have to go back to the quantity question. AI can produce endless work, which can easily overwhelm our systems. Agent query inboxes, magazine slush piles, etc. There will have to be some way to combat this. An editor simply cannot evaluate 100 times as many manuscripts. They were already getting too many to really read before ChatGPT. So I fear these systems will close down and become more about networking and personal recommendations and such, not because people want to be elitist but because they have to find some way to winnow things down. Will established writers be even more wary of blurbing someone they don’t know? Will agents be less likely to open cold queries? I do think community, as JP says, is one answer. Maybe we will see a flourishing of local art scenes or groups of artists with shared aesthetics.

The other optimistic thing I tell myself is that there will always be people who care about good literature and interesting art. And maybe the flattening effects of LLM text will conversely inspire readers and writers to be more original and more unique in their art. LLM fans love to compare it to the camera, but the camera didn’t kill painting as an art form by any stretch. Instead, it helped push painting into new territory, with styles outside of realism: impressionism, surrealism, cubism, etc. Maybe there’s a utopian scenario where that happens for literature in response to LLM text.

KS: Since I am in the book publicity space, I will say this: Almost every PR platform is now AI-powered, and it is not for the better. In fact, it has made researching contacts and creating media lists more difficult because these systems basically scrape the internet. In the “old” days, we had a system that one guy created and that we manually updated. It was dependable. What is out there now, and what most PR professionals pay quite a bit of money for, is not all that dependable. Interestingly, I think this makes cultivating relationships with journalists more important than ever.

I also worry about the workload of in-house publicists. Most marketing and publicity departments are understaffed, so it is easy to imagine publishers creating an environment where AI assistance is necessary because they don’t want to spend the money on human staff.

I agree with JP and Lincoln that younger writers have an uphill battle ahead of them. How will agents assess queries or manuscripts? Will younger writers be questioned about their work if it seems too good? I think debut novelists are especially susceptible to scrutiny. I don’t envy the position they are in. I also agree with LM regarding systems being overwhelmed. Agents and editors already receive more submissions than is humanly possible to read or keep up with. If the pace of this worsens, it will indeed come down to personal connections and recommendations. If that is the case, I fear we will miss out on some great books.