Dear readers, The inevitable is upon us: A.I. is writing novels, and the publishing world is mostly unprepared. Yesterday, Hachette canceled an upcoming horror book, “Shy Girl,” after The Times approached the publisher citing evidence that its author appears to have used A.I. to write it. The book has already been published in Britain, but will be discontinued there. (The author, Mia Ballard, denied using A.I. personally, and instead said that someone she hired to edit the book had used it.) I was somewhat heartened to learn that eagle-eyed readers were among the first to suspect the use of A.I. in the book. Humanity can still be a bulwark, at least for now. But the episode, and the relentless incursion of A.I. into every aspect of how we use language, is forcing publishers to contend with a scenario for which they aren’t adequately prepared. “It’s a real problem, and we do have to find some guardrails,” said Mary Rasenberger, the chief executive of the Authors Guild (which is leading a class-action copyright lawsuit on behalf of authors against OpenAI and Microsoft). “There are publishers and authors who think the quality of A.I. is at a level that it’s not going to compete with them, and I don’t think that’s the case with the new large language models.” Now is not the time to be an ostrich, in other words. I recommend this quiz featuring pairs of writing samples: one an excerpt from a published literary work, the other generated by A.I. The results, especially as someone who has tried to quarantine myself from chatbot writing, were pretty sobering. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue, and your feelings about A.I.-generated fiction. You can reach me by emailing books@nytimes.com. And as always we’d love to hear what you’re reading. See you next week. Like this email? We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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