April 23, 2026

AI, Writing, and Publishing

We all use AI. If you Google anything — from doing research to online shopping to Microsoft’s Copilot to those mobile phone plant apps — you’ve used it. I use TurboScribe for transcribing long interviews. Many in business use it to copy edit documents. However, in the world of book publishing and journalism, it’s frowned upon for many legitimate reasons.

Image: Unkas Photo/Adobe Stock

In March 2026, publisher Hachette Book Group canceled the U.S. release of the horror novel “Shy Girl” by Mia Ballard and discontinued its UK edition due to evidence that the book was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence. This incident is considered the first time a major publishing house has pulled a commercial novel due to AI-generated text concerns.

So, full disclosure: that is pulled verbatim from Google’s AI Overview. Reads just fine, doesn’t it? However, what I would normally have done is additional research from various sources, adding a few more details (like Mia Ballard being an American novelist and poet who says a person she hired to edit the original self-published version of “Shy Girl” used AI without her knowledge.  Or the fact that Thad McIlroy, a San Franscisco-based tech analyst and writer, alerted The New York Times to the story and supplied background information and is annoyed the Times didn’t credit him in the resulting article

This year’s other high-profile publishing scandal involving AI also involved the Times. Last January, a review of Jean-Baptiste’s “Watching Over Her,” ran in The New York Times Book Review. Book reviews aren’t the best venues to use AI. Most reviews are for recently published books that may have only had a handful of other reviews. (So the pool AI would draw from is shallow.) It turns out part of the reviewer, British journalist Alex Preston’s, piece contained verbatim sections from a review published earlier in The Guardian. On April 1st, the Times ran this correction:

“A review on Feb. 15, 2026, by Alex Preston of the novel “Watching Over Her,” included language from an August 2025 review of the same book in The Guardian. Mr. Preston, a freelance reviewer, told The Times that he used an A.I. tool that incorporated material from the Guardian review into his draft, which he failed to identify and remove. His reliance on A.I. and his use of unattributed work by another writer are a clear violation of The Times’s standards. We have found no issues in previous reviews Mr. Preston has written for The Times. The Guardian review of “Watching Over Her” is now linked from Mr. Preston’s review online.”

Preston has said in interviews that he used an AI editing tool when drafting his review unaware that he had plagiarized from The Guardian. He described himself in an interview as, like many writers, “naively and clumsily using a tool they didn’t understand…” This quote is from a thoughtful substack piece by Sam Leith, the books editor of the British newsmagazine, The Spectator. Leith, who admits he’s a friendly acquaintance of Preston and has published his reviews in the past, wrote:  “Why would a critic of his calibre want or need to use AI to help with a review? And why — lord, why? — would he risk doing so in a space as high-profile as the New York Times?”

Concluding that he believes Preston’s explanation and apology (although doesn’t condone his use of AI), Leith wrote: “Bottom line, though, kids, these tools are undermining not just the work and livelihoods of writers: they are undermining the very things that make the world trust and value what writers do. Don’t touch the fuckers with a disinfected plastic wand.”

But to imagine that writers of all kinds won’t be using AI in various ways is a fantasy. According to a 2024 (how much has changed since then!) report by Nieman Lab, major newsrooms across America are introducing initiatives to develop and use AI in an ethical way that retains journalistic standards.

Book publishing is experiencing similar changes, with AI being used in various aspects of the business while remaining a problem when it comes to the “product” itself: books. The Washington, D.C.-based Capitol Techology University published a report on AI and the book publishing industry in March 2026. One conclusion: “AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini have been found to provide users with fabricated data that appears authentic. Books or scientific articles that are based on AI-driven data or verbiage may perpetuate false information in an officially published format.”

The frightening thing is that it could happen to any of us. Most of those who have been caught appear not to be con artists but adopters of a technology we’re not all that familiar with. (If we were, we’d probably be gearheads making a lot more money working in the tech sector.) The message for writers is: be careful. Ultimately, the most important thing we all have is our reputations.