Another book deal bites the dust

Despite the latest crime novel being currently unpublished, film and TV studios around the world had already begun jostling for rights for “Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body,” according to Deadline, making it a particularly hairy situation. But AI detectors exposed apparent “fingerprints,” or signs that the author had made use of the tech while drafting the novel. Falade has denied the accusations. — Major Publisher Cans $2.4 Million Book Deal After Author Was Accused of Using AI

Being an author in the age of AI is going to become increasingly trickier. I’m reminded of an article by Joan Westenberg: “The AI writing witchhunt is idiotic”:

The tools are biased and inaccurate; they spit out false positives at rates that should make anyone uncomfortable using them as evidence of anything, and yet people treat the output like a blood test that came back positive, forgetting, apparently, that blood tests are retested and retested because no single test is entirely accurate.

The idea of false positives makes me nervous. The other day I put a chunk of my writing into one of those “AI detectors” and it said “100% human” which made me feel only moderately better. I mean I know I don’t use AI to write, but who’s going to believe me if a piece of software says otherwise?