226: The Shy Girl Controversy & AI in Publishing

 

Mentioned in this article: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/books/ai-fiction-shy-girl.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/books/shy-girl-book-ai.html

 

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The Shy Girl Controversy & AI in Publishing

Hi friends, welcome to your Big Way of Life podcast. We are going to reschedule our Q&A episode for March. It's going to come out April 7th instead. I wanted to get this episode out talking about the Shy Girl controversy because all of this is very timely and it's unfolding really quickly and I wanted to put this out there while this is developing and we're going to be back to the Q&A episode next week. So it'll just be one week behind. Sorry for the delay, but again, I wanted to just make sure that we touch on this while everything is coming out because it feels very important. It's very noteworthy. It's very big news what's happening with this, the AI allegations over Shy Girl. So wanted to touch on that this week. All right, we'll be back for the Q&A episode next week. Enjoy the episode.

Hi friend, welcome to your Big Creative Life podcast. We're doing something different. I'm doing a spontaneous episode this week. I'm recording this on March 24th. I want to talk about the Shy Girl allegations, the AI allegations. and the controversy surrounding this particular book. And I'll go over it briefly if you're not sure what I'm talking about. But yeah, I wanted to record this episode and I hadn't planned on it. So I'm at home in my, sitting at my dining room table recording this episode right now. When something, I think I've only done one other podcast episode touching on a book talk related controversy because I think there were some takeaways for writers in how that author was handling that particular controversy. I think there was a role for me as an editor to step in and add my two cents and also do some like education on what an editor does and doesn't do. And I feel like almost slightly less, well, I feel that way a little bit about this. So I want to just like kind of touch on the controversy and what I want us to all take away from this as authors. Before we get into the specifics of this, and I'll give you a little Cliff's Notes version if you're not familiar with the controversy that I'm talking about, but I want to make it clear right off the bat, in case you are new to the podcast, in case you are new to me, I want to make it very clear what my stance on generative AI is related to writing and publishing and everything because it's very important to me, not just as someone who's a book editor, but also someone who is an author, who's someone who's trying to get traditionally published, a book lover and someone who values human created art. I care very, very, very deeply about this. I am against all forms of generative AI in the writing process. Now what this means for me, my policy in my editing business, the distinction I make is If you are using AI in some capacity related to like grammar or spell check or an accessibility tool or dictation, that's all fine because the AI capability, the AI tool is not generating the ideas for you. When I'm dictating, for example, I dictate in Microsoft Word, I press that microphone button and I talk out my book. It is transcribing exactly what I'm saying. There is no ChatGPT or Claude or some specific app that I don't even know about that is going in to improve my sentences and suggest where I can add more detail and rewrite things for me and give me feedback on the dialogue and the characters. Like that's not... That's not how I'm using it. purely is just transcribing. Same thing with like Speechify. That's a speech-to-text or text-to-speech tool. If there's an accessibility thing that you need, if it's the spell checker in Microsoft Word, yeah, technically those use AI, but like that's different. And I think we can all agree that that's very different than like ChatGPT or Claude or some other tool. Brainstorming, coming up with plot ideas, writing sentences for you, finishing your book, giving you feedback. That is very, very different.

So that's where I draw the line. I'm very against generative AI in the creative process at all, including brainstorming, coming up with your worlds, your magic system, feedback, et cetera. And then, that's just where I stand on that. And I have a couple of podcast episodes you can check out if you'd like more information about my stance and why I'm so against it, because I have a list of reasons that you should care about if you're listening to this podcast and you're an author or a book lover. One is just all the reasons I'm against it. And then one is a tough love episode that I did a couple of months ago about why, like what I would say to any author who is considering using AI. And I kind of go through all the arguments I hear from authors who are using generative AI and want to brag about it and they think it's great. I go through all the arguments that I hear and why like they're such ******** and I just yell at you about not using AI. So you can listen to that if you're tempted. Okay, now that I've gone over that. Again, check out those episodes if you want more context about like my stance because we're not going to get into that in this episode. All right. I want to read part of a New York Times article about this. article was, I'll link it in the show notes for this episode. It was published on March 19th, 2026. And this is about the time that I heard about all this. I'm recording this on March 24th. This episode will come out in early April. So I have not been aware of this for long. I think all of this has unfolded pretty quickly. Okay, Hachette Book Group, one of the largest publishers in the US, pulled a forthcoming horror novel in a decision that followed widespread allegations online that the author, Mia Ballard, relied heavily on artificial intelligence to write the book. On Thursday, a day after the New York Times approached Hachette, citing evidence that the novel appeared to be AI generated, the company said it was pulling the book from publication. But Thursday afternoon, the novel was removed from Amazon and the Hachette website. The publisher told the Times that they decided not to publish Shy Girl, which was due out in the US this spring after conducting A thorough and lengthy review of the text. And they're also going to just continue printing it in the UK where it was initially printed. where it was published last fall. So this book was self-published in February of 2025. Mia Ballard is the author. And it got, it had like a decent Goodreads rating. It got, you know, some traction in the self-publishing space. And I have not looked at the Goodreads reviews, but I read a couple of articles about this, just kind of trying to get my bearance about it. And one article I read said that there were already like some comments back in February 2025 from readers who were like, this seems kind of AI generated. But I don't know.

Readers can say that about stuff that they don't like or stuff that's like not well written. So I don't know that necessarily means anything. But Traditional publishing got wind of this. They approached the author, the author approached the, like Hachette, I'm not sure exactly how the timing worked, but she got a traditional book deal. Hachette is a big five publisher. They're a massive publisher. And the imprint was Orbit, I believe, which does, I have a friend who has a fantasy book published through them. So I guess they must do speculative fiction because this is horror, the book that was Shy girl. Anyways, okay, let me go back to the article here. Okay, so the book was published in November of 2025. And that's a short timeline if you think about it. Like normally when you are an author who does not have a book published already, you get a book deal. It can take a year and a half to two years for the book to be published. This is pretty fast because the book was already written. I'm assuming there was not much editing that was done in between that because that's just a very tight timeline, but I don't know. One of the problems with this whole story and the whole response from the publisher is like people are wondering how could this have happened? Anyway, so I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me back up.

So more reviews started coming in where people were like, this reads like AI, slop. Like there's something going on with this. And so let me, okay. The book quickly found an audience among horror fans and Hachette published it in the UK last fall and planned to release it in the US this spring. Earlier this year, Max Sparrow, the founder and CEO of Pengram, an AI detection program, heard of the claims about Shy Girl and decided to run a test of the full text. Its results indicated that the book was 78% AI generated. I'm very confident that this is largely AI generated or very heavily AI assisted, said Sparrow, who posted his research on X. The Times also analyzed passages from the novel using several AI detection tools and found recurring patterns characteristic of AI-generated text, like gaps in logic, excessive use of melodramatic adjectives, and an over-reliance on the rule of three. Now, if you have been paying attention to AI writing at all, not just in books like in fiction and publishing at large, but like in colleges, for example, there's a lot of, It's pretty well known that these AI detection tools are not great. There have been tests where people input, you know, stuff that they wrote into it and it comes back as like 85% AI generated or whatever. So like, I don't have a ton of faith in those. And I think a lot of people don't have a ton of faith in those.

So I'm assuming that that's not, you know, what Hachette did because the author responded. Let me get her quote here. Okay, the author of Shy Girl, Mia Ballard, who according to her author, Bio, writes poetry and lives in North Carolina, has very little social media presence and doesn't appear to address the allegations of AI use in her feeds. In an e-mail to the Times, she denied using AI to write Shy Girl, contending that an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version of the novel had used AI. Hachette also asks its authors to disclose whether they are using AI to the company. So So there was some admitting on the author's part that like she's saying she didn't use AI, but that someone she hired to help her with the book before it got self-published used AI, and therefore there is some AI usage that's present in the book. So Hachette's response was very quick. They pulled it, they canceled the US release, et cetera. So what's interesting about this response and watching all of this crossover from just like book news and writing news to the general news is it's really the first, at least that I'm aware of, certainly the biggest instance of this happening where a book gets pulled that's been traditionally published because of AI usage.

Now, one of the things that's sort of frustrating about this is there are authors who are openly saying that they use AI and there doesn't appear to be anywhere sort of, anywhere, anything close to like the backlash. I mean, I'm thinking of James Frey, specifically scam artist James Frey, who lied in his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, and it came out that he had made-up things in the book and, you know, presented them as true. And I'm not talking about like stretching the truth or adding details in a memoir, because there's some creative license in a memoir, of course, but he just like fabricated things. He has said that he uses AI and he's trained his AI model so that you can't tell what's him and what's the AI, which is so, I'm sorry, that is so insulting and rude and entitled to readers. Like, I'm sorry, I don't have time to write this book. but still pay me for it and still support me. Like you can't even be bothered to write your own books. Come on. So it's really frustrating to see. He has a new book out that I've been seeing. I've seen the cover on like social media a couple of places. I can't even remember what it's called. I don't care. I'm not going to read it. But it's just like frustrating that an author who like that doesn't get the same sort of backlash. And of course, Mia Ballard is a black woman. So there's this added layer of like, okay, it's already hard enough for women of color, people of color generally, to break into traditional publishing.

And seeing this backlash is really disheartening. But the bottom line is some of this book is AI generated. And that's a problem. What I've heard from agents and editors and publishers and authors is that people are publishers are starting to add to their contracts so that you can't use AI or you have to sign something saying you didn't use AI. In the past, it was more of a focus in the contract on like an original work. saying that you didn't, you didn't steal this from someone, you're not passing this off as your own. And it really comes down to copyright, because if AI spit out a book, you can't copyright that book. And so that presents a problem as well. So I don't know exactly what is in, what was in her contract and what the publisher put in there, but the fact that she did use, there was some AI usage involved is troubling. And for me, I think why I want to talk about this too is like, It just is odd. And Mia Balor has said that she's not sharing more because of legal stuff. Like, I'm thinking maybe she's going to sue. I'm not sure. Like, she's just saying, I'm not going to share more. It's troubling that if this is true, that an editor she hired or an acquaintance that she had work on the book with her used AI, That's troubling. And I'm wondering when the author, when Mia Ballard found out about this, like, did she know that this editor used AI? Or was it only after these comments and these reviews and this reader, all these reader responses started coming in, is it only then that she realized, like, something's up?

Let me go talk to this friend who, or this person I know who worked on this with me and ask them. I wonder if she only found out then, assuming all of this is true, right? Like, I wonder, because that would be heartbreaking, right? If an editor that you hired or someone you had, like, will help you with the book if they used AI. But I think what's odd about it, though, is just the only scenario I can think of where an editor would essentially rewrite portions of your book is if you hired an editor to do a line edit for you. A line edit is a very detailed line by line, word by word, sentence by sentence edit, where the editor is going in to suggest a more succinct way of phrasing something, to suggest a different metaphor if something sounds clunky, if they're like, hey, you use this word three times in this sentence, maybe pick a different word. Just they're really working with you to improve the prose and the flow and the syntax of your words of your sentences, so it's very detailed and it can slightly reshape an author's style and voice because the editor is suggesting different ways of like wording things, but a good line editor. really a line editor is never completely tearing something apart and then going into rewrite it. That's not what line editing is.

You are not imposing your own style upon the author. I don't offer line editing because it's not my strength as an editor. I've done versions of it before and I just don't feel like I'm the best person to line edit. I do a bit of it when I copy edit just because I'm like, oh, let's rephrase this. Or I won't even say like, let's rephrase this, but I'll just leave a comment like, hey, I would maybe pick a different word here or like I'll leave a suggestion for the author. But what you have to remember with editing is that it's always a suggestion. It's not like the author gets a manuscript back and the author's just like, well, okay, they rewrote all this, so I guess I have to accept it. And this is just my book now. Like, when I'm copy editing, which is I'm going in to clean up punctuation, grammar, subject-verb agreement, verb tense, clunky phrasing, incomplete sentences, all that stuff. I'm just making changes with the track changes feature in Word turned on. So an author could get all of those changes and be like, nope, I don't want to accept any of these changes. I want to just keep it the way it was. Like the author has the free license to do that. If you are self-publishing, you are the final, you get the final say on what the book looks like. So even if this editor had gone in to suggest things, Mia Ballard could have had the freedom to like reject or accept those suggestions. That's really all they are. It's just suggestions. So yeah, it just feels odd that, and really I can't even, like I cannot, I'm trying to think through the logistics of how you would use AI to line edit something because it would require you putting in the pages into an LLM.

Let's just say ChatGPT for the sake of simplicity here. in this example, you would put it into ChatGPT and then like, I don't know how it would, I guess it would just rewrite it for you and then you'd copy and paste it and put it back into the manuscript. I don't know. I'm just struggling to think about like how this would work logistically. But because Mia Ballard has said that and as by way of an explanation of why these AI detectors were catching this and why readers might be catching things, it's concerning that the publisher didn't notice this. It's concerning that there were Goodreads comments or comments online from readers about like, hey, some of these passages kind of read as AI. Not every comment, not all of them. It was well reviewed on Goodreads. I imagine that's part of why she got picked up by TradPub. But the fact that they didn't pick up on it or I don't know, Hachette's response has been very vague and murky. Their quote was something along the lines of like, I don't know, let me see if I can find it. Like we're committed to, Hachette remains committed to protecting original creative expression and storytelling, Hachette spokeswoman said. She added that Hachette requires all submissions to be original to the authors and ask authors to disclose to the company whether they are using AI during the writing process.

So I don't know. what to say. I mean, I'm wondering if the editor who acquired the book was just like, this is just her writing style, whatever. Maybe they even asked her and she denied it. Like, it's hard to know without more information from the publisher what the timeline was and what exactly went on in terms of their editing that they were doing to the book. So we don't know. Anyone that's, we're just kind of speculating at this point. I'm speculating in this episode right now, which I'm sorry to do. I kind of hate that, but we just don't know. What I, what I will say for myself personally, as an author who is going down this road, who wants to have a long career as an author, in a way, it's been very positive to see that this has received so much backlash because I don't want us to get to a place where AI generated books are like standard in traditional publishing. I don't want to see that happen. I don't want to see a market for AI generated books. And unfortunately, right now, there's no regulation around this. There's no requirement that an author has to say, AI generated this or AI assisted with this work. There was that New York Times article about that author putting that in quotes a couple of months ago, how she's churning out 200 books a year. And she was like, there was a quote that was something along the lines of like, as long as readers don't know, it sells fine.

So she's not, all of her, she like writes a book in like an hour. with using some LLM, I don't know what it is, some tool, puts it out there. Readers don't know. None of her books are popular, but she churns out so many of them that she's able to like make a living off of this. Anyways, I don't want us to get to, I don't want us to get to a place where AI stuff is just flooded in traditional publishing. Because I don't want to support that as an author, as someone who loves books, as a reader, like I will not be buying any AI assisted books. And I want to know. I want to know if the author used AI or not. So in a way, yeah, it has been a good thing, I think. And publishers are watching. Like this is a massive story. It broke beyond the, I think I said this earlier, it's crossed over from just like book news and publishing news to larger news. People are paying attention to this because this is the biggest instance of this happening so far. And I think everyone's kind of watching to see, like, how are publishers handling this? How are readers handling this? Are readers open to this? I mean, imagine if the responses had been different. Imagine if last year there were comments and allegations, but like, whatever, nothing really came of it. Hachette acquired the book. They published it. There were a couple of allegations. They, confronted the author. She's like, yeah, someone used AI when they were editing the book. The publisher was like, well, we still stand by her. It's fine. And readers were like, all right, I still like the book. It doesn't matter. Imagine if that had been the response. Publishers would probably, I imagine, be taking note of that and like, okay, so it's not a PR disaster if an author used AI. So I'm grateful that it hasn't gone that way.

Now, something else I wanted to touch on. There was some controversy around the cover with this book, which I'm not going to really get into, I guess. I'm already looking at my time. I'm already 21 minutes into this episode. I don't... I'm thinking about this author. I'm just like taking a second to think about this author and if I were in her shoes. It. She, did put out a statement that was something about like her mental health, how much her mental health has suffered. And I can imagine like I can, have compassion and empathy for her because this would suck. And if she truly didn't use AI, if this other person did, that sucks. I mean, the bucks should still stop with her. Like she should still take ownership of the fact that she didn't write those passages and is passing this off as her original work. But despite what she's done or not done, or I don't know, it would suck. So I can like extend compassion to her because it, the other thing that I think a lot of people are talking about is how desperately they don't want this to become a witch hunt. that every time a book comes out with some clunky phrasing or awkward metaphors, or there's a plot hole, or there's like, that people are going to just accuse them of writing with AI. And I am in a total agreement of that. I don't want to get to that place either. And there's also this weird like chicken and the egg thing where I was just talking about this with a friend of mine. So many people, if you use ChatGPT or Claude or like any whatever AI tool for work, and you're familiar with the cadence of the writing and you see it on social media all the time, it's like maybe that starts to seep into your brain.

And so then without even realizing it, you might start to write like AI writing, even though you're not using AI writing. And I'm like, oh God, that's horrifying. What if your voice just becomes like AI-ish because that's what you see in social media all so much content. God, so much content on Instagram is just AI slop. So many books are AI slop that are on Amazon. Like it's just, it's everywhere. Anyways. So again, I'm recording this March 24th. I don't know. We'll see what the ramifications are, what the fallout is of this, if there's any more information that comes out about why this wasn't caught by the publishers before it got to this point. I really am interested in that. Let me see if there's anything else I want to touch on. I'll just mention this. Penguin Random House, this is from, everything I'm reading is from these two New York Times articles that I'll put in the show notes. Penguin Random House, the largest publishing company in the US, has created guidelines to set parameters around AI use for authors and illustrators that echo its contractual clauses stipulating originality. Representatives of other major publishing companies declined to elaborate in their policies, apart from noting those originality clauses.

Still, some worry that the ambiguity surrounding AI and the stigma the technology carries in the literary world makes it more likely that writers might not be transparent around it. I think this is, maybe this will be a wake-up call for publishers and agents and anyone who works in the traditional publishing world that, like, we've got to have You've got to have guardrails around this. You've got to have very clear policies around what's acceptable and what's not acceptable other than just like, oh, it has to be an original work. Because until we have laws, until we have regulation around AI, this is going to continue to happen. It's probably going to get worse. I don't doubt that there's a traditionally published book on the market right now that was AI assisted and it just slipped through the cracks. Like I have no doubt. But it's just frustrating that as a consumer, as a reader, we don't have the ability to know if something was 100% human authored or not. The Authors Guild, which is like a, actually I think they might have mentioned that in this episode. Oh yeah, it's a real problem and we do have to find some guardrails, said Mary Rasenberger, the CEO of the Authors Guild, which is leading a class action copyright lawsuit on behalf of authors against OpenAI.

So anyways, The Authors Guild has like a symbol or a label that you can put on your book saying like 100% human authored, which I think is awesome. Because again, in the absence of regulation, it's sort of up to us, like the authors and the consumers, the readers, to demand some transparency around this so that we can decide who we want to support and who we don't want to support. But it's also, I think, important, very, very important for you to know all of this, to be aware of these clauses and these guidelines. if you want to query or are currently querying. You cannot submit to agents or agencies who have this policy of no AI assisted work. And every time I talk about this on social media, I get a lot of DMs from people wanting to ask permission. Like, well, is this okay? I used AI for this. Can I query here? So I'm going to just put out a blanket answer that I don't know. You don't, why are you asking me? You can't outsource that. You have to go to the agent's website, submission guidelines, whatever, to find out what their guidelines and their policies are. I can't answer that for you.

So you need to do the work to figure that out yourself. Also, like maybe just don't use AI in the 1st place. You don't have to worry about this. But it's important for anyone querying. But then also, I think this is also a very big deal for indie authors. I don't think it's necessarily a great strategy to self-publish and then think that if you have like if you self-publish a book that TradPub will automatically come calling and want to pick it up because that doesn't happen for most self-published titles. I mean there has to be like you have to have a good number of you know sales and a track record in order for traditional publishing to like pick it up. But it does happen And if you used AI in your writing process, if AI wrote part of your book that was self-published, and then you get some traction with it, you do well, you become successful, and TradPub wants to acquire it, you're going to have to answer honestly about your AI usage. And wouldn't that suck to be put in that position? So I don't know. I just think it's kind of a note of caution for anyone who is using AI, generative AI in the process or thinking about it, because maybe you're an author who's new and you're like, well, what's the harm? Like, I see some authors talking about it. Like, it can't be that big of a deal, but it is. It's a very ******* big deal.

Again, I won't lecture you because you can go check out the other episodes if you want that lecture. But yeah, it's something you need to know. It's something you need to be aware of. And I think all eyes are sort of like on publishing to see how they're handling this. And again, I think the silver lining is it is good to see that there's been such a backlash and that Hachette acted and they pulled the book. That to me is promising and it might discourage authors from, you know, using AI in the future. I don't know. Okay, well, there is more information out there about this if you want to read some more articles about it. There's also, I think one of the big things that got a lot of attention on Shy Girl is this YouTuber who did a YouTube. I'm not even sure. I can't remember what the YouTuber's name is or the video or anything. I haven't watched it. But the point is, there's a lot of critiques and analysis and criticism and just people talking about this, I guess. So you can go check out, all of that if you want to see more information about this. Like I said, there hasn't been a ton of information from the publisher yet. I don't know if there will be more or not or from the author. So we'll just have to kind of wait and see.

But all right, I'm going to wrap this up. This is getting a little bit long, but thanks for sticking with me on this. I don't want to dogpile on an author who is probably having an extremely hard time right now. especially being a black woman, I just like, I feel for her and it sucks. But also we have to hold people accountable. And if she did use AI, that's not okay to then sign something saying it's an original work. And if the editor used AI and she knew about it, that's not okay. And if this editor, like who is this editor? What kind of scam editor would be using AI? Like that's the other piece of it that really frustrates me. You're not an editor if you use AI. No legitimate reputable editor, freelance editor will use AI on your book. No, that's not happening. And I'm like, I hope people don't see that and it like scares them away from working with an editor if they're self, if they're self-publishing. No legitimate editor is using AI. Full stop. All right, well thank you for listening and I hope this was interesting or helpful. We'll keep paying attention to this to see where it goes, but moral of the story, don't use generative AI. Okay, and also don't support like James Frey and those guys, like any author who brags about using AI, that's insulting and rude and entitled, so don't support those authors either.

Katie Wolf