Best-selling book might be 60% AI
As AI writing gets better, will taboos against it persist?
People usually think it’s fine to use AI to code something, design a website, or even create a slick slide deck. But AI for writing? That’s a big no-no, according to many.
Will it stay that way? A recent article in The Atlantic covers the highly praised book Daggermouth, a dystopian romance about a female mercenary who has to marry the person she was supposed to kill. Simon & Schuster acquired the book in a seven-figure deal, and it “has spent months on USA Today’s best-seller list.” The article describes it as a “viral hit.”
The catch? AI accusations. In a not-yet peer-reviewed study that ran 14,000+ randomly-selected e-books through the well-regarded AI detection tool Pangram, Daggermouth received a score of 60% AI generated.
Important caveats: The author denies the allegations, Pangram isn’t perfect (though it’s pretty good), and the score lumps together “AI-generated” with “moderately AI-assisted,” the second of which carries less of a taboo.
But it seems pretty clear that the book is not entirely human written. According to a University of Maryland professor unaffiliated with the study, a human-written book returning a 60% Pangram score is “almost statistically impossible.” When the Atlantic reporter ran Chapter 18 through Pangram, it “classified the first few paragraphs as human-written and the rest of the chapter as 100 percent AI.” Finally, the study authors did a second check: looking for “rare expressions” that are common in other texts suspected of AI generation but don’t appear in human writing. They found a bunch. One example is a sentence that appears both in Daggermouth and in an e-book from a different author: “They collapsed together, a tangle of sweat-slicked limbs and racing hearts.” Ew.
Nevertheless, the article is careful to point out that this book seems different from “AI slop.” First, people genuinely like it. Second, Wolfe isn’t churning out tons of content; she’s only written two books and the sequel to Daggermouth is not expected until next year, “an indication that Wolfe’s process likely involved significant amounts of genuine human craft.”
Without having read the novel, I would tend to agree. If Wolfe is using AI to provide feedback on her work, and it’s giving her some rewrites that it thinks are better, is using those all that different than taking rewrites from an editor?
It’s fairly uncontroversial that writers shouldn’t use AI to generate writing from scratch and then slap their names on it. But I don’t fully understand the taboo behind using AI as an editor or thought partner, especially when it’s not a taboo that applies to other fields. The main reason I’d discourage using AI for edits has more to do with quality. You can’t tell, from the outside, whether something is coded with AI. But at least with today’s tools, you can often tell when something is written by AI, and the style can be grating. Another issue: writers, who are intimately familiar with their own ideas, often overlook missing context because they fill in the gaps themselves. This can make it hard to notice when AI subtly changes their intended meaning, which it seems to do often.
Of course, the signs of AI writing are only visible to people who have become familiar with them. Many Daggermouth fans certainly weren’t bothered. And given how fast AI capabilities are increasing, it seems likely AI writing will get both better and less tell-tale. I don’t think the taboo against AI writing will go away anytime soon, but it might become so unverifiable as to cease being very discussion-worthy. How will writers respond?
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
"is using those all that different than taking rewrites from an editor?"
Yes, because an editor is a human being. Therefore an editor's suggestions are *intended.* Nothing an AI says is intended because there is no human being there to intend it. Without a communicator, there is no communication. Without a speaker, there is no speech. Do you see? Presenting a speakerless non-speech as if it were speech, as if it were the response of a human person to a *felt reality,* is a lie and a betrayal.