Logo text Rambling hasn’t read it so we can’t vouch for the quality of the prose, but Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body must be one doozy of a book. Because 14 different publishers ended up bidding on it last month, with the winner — Minotaur, a division of Macmillan — offering a reported $2.4 million. Make that almost offering. The deal swiftly fell apart after accusations began swirling that its author used AI to pen his thriller about a Harvey Keitel-in-Pulp Fiction-like professional “cleaner” who gets mixed up with a drug cartel in Texas.
If you’re keeping score, it’s the third time something like that has happened this year. Back in March, Hachette yanked Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl from U.S. shelves after running Ballard’s prose through an AI detector and finding that 78 percent of the text had been computer-generated (Ballard claims a freelance editor helping her with the book was the one who slipped in the slop). Just last month, there was a kerfuffle over Daggermouth, a viral self-published dystopian thriller that got picked up by Simon & Schuster in a reported seven-figure deal. Another detector concluded that 60 percent of that book had been computer-generated, but it got published in late July anyway, after its author, H.M. Wolfe, vigorously denied the accusations.
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The details around I’ll Hide the Body scandal (first broken by Jeff Sneider’s The InSneider) are only a bit different. While its author, a 25-year-old Nigerian named Jerry Falade, also vehemently denies using AI, in his case nobody seems to believe him — especially after Publishers Lunch ran his manuscript through a detector and got a 97 percent AI score. “Within six hours, I had been dropped by my agency, deals were paused and press releases were being issued,” Falade recently told The Guardian. The accusations also blew up the film rights auction that UTA’s Jason Richman was reportedly getting ready to handle.
What all three cases have in common is that nobody can quite explain what exactly the crime here is. Yes, publishers have reason for caution — there are copyright complications since AI-generated writing isn’t protected under current law — but it’s not clear how much, if at all, readers care about the purity of their paperbacks. After all, if a book is a ripping enough yarn to get 14 publishers bidding on it — and Hollywood is interested — does it matter how it was written? And then, of course, there’s the small matter of proof. AI detectors are notoriously glitchy. One Stanford-led study found that non-native English writers — like Falade — were falsely flagged more than 60 percent of the time.
But it turns out even English-native writers aren’t immune to false positives. As an experiment, we decided to feed this 100 percent human-crafted Rambling item into a randomly selected online AI detector. It (incorrectly) deduced that 96 percent of this made-from-scratch item was whipped up by AI.
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Also in Rambling Reporter:
Operation Varsity Blues’ ring leader is back — and still wants to help kids get into college; THR unearths lost letters from 007 creator.
This story appeared in the Aug. 5 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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