Well, this is certainly the feel-good story of the week:
HELP
Author suing me for saying her book is AI in a review
A few months ago I read a book that was recommended here (obviously not naming it because apparently I’m already in enough trouble) and found an obvious AI line, “let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding.” I was suspicious right away. I kept reading and found more things that didn’t even make sense. “She padded across the floor,” for example. That would be okay in a shifter romance but humans don’t “pad.” Characters were doing generic things like dragging their hands through their hair, clencing their jaws and arching their eyebrows. A side character’s name changed too, and only for one sentence.
I don’t want to post my exact review because I don’t know if I should be talking about this online in the first place and don’t want to bring more attention to it. But all I said was that the book is AI and I explained how I could tell. That’s literally all I did.
BUT THE WOMAN IS SUING ME.
I’ve been panic-Googling for like 48 hours straight and apparently she has to prove what I said was false. But how can she prove she DIDN’T use AI? I’m a grad student. I have $73 in my bank account, I can’t afford to deal with this right now. I’m literally so broke that I got the book through ✨other means✨ so I’m wondering if the fact I didn’t make a purchase might actually help?? I know this is a stretch but I’m in full panic mode 😭
I have really bad anxiety and she is a big enough author I think she has the resources to follow through. Should I message her and apologize and promise to delete the review? I would have already deleted it but I feel like that’s my only leverage at this point
Help 😭
Edit: I’m in Florida if that matters.
I can’t speak to the overall/underlying veracity of this Reddit post, though I do pray that every word is true.
A brief flaying, if you will1:
Of course I immediately went rabidly, frothingly searching for a book that includes both “let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding” and “she padded across the floor,” and I’m sorry to have to report that I’ve come up empty-handed,2 but I remain tickled pink, cerise, and scarlet at the thought that “let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding” might somehow indicate reliance on AI, in that I have successfully located the phrase “let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding” (on its own, that is, and quite, quite verbatim) in literally—and by literally I mean literally—dozens of books published these last few decades by, presumably, human and non-AI-assisted writers. Which reminds us only that if AI is indeed going into the novel-writing business, it is doing so by means of plagiarism.3
As to “she padded across the floor,” it is certainly news to me that only shifters—by which I presume our Panicked Complainant means shape shifters; you’ll pardon me, I don’t speak fluent romantasy—pad across floors, as padding across floors is a thing I for one have been doing for decades, and so far as I know I do not, even given my penchant for rabid frothing, transform into a beast by the glow of the full moon; moreover, human padding across floors is a thing with long-standing literary pedigree, including in works by the great Mary Roberts Rinehart (“I padded across the floor in one stocking foot,” plucked up at random) and the mellifluously named Wyndham Martyn, in whose The Return of Anthony Trent (1923) a certain Mrs. Strauss “switch[es] on the lights and pad[s] across the floor to the jewel box which, for all its silver beauty, was steel lined and had a combination lock.”4
As to “characters . . . doing generic things like dragging their hands through their hair, clenc[h]ing5 their jaws and arching their eyebrows,” I must report that writers’ characters have been dragging their hands through their hair, clenc[h]ing their jaws,6 and arching their eyebrows since time immemorial, and without the connivance of bots.
As to “A side character’s name changed too, and only for one sentence”? Shit happens. 🤷🏻♂️.
Amid all this hand-wringing geschreiing, it’s especially amusing to note that our Panicked Complainant, who to be honest wouldn’t, accusations-wise, pass muster as a lesser afflicted girl in a bus-and-truck tour of The Crucible, seems to have gotten their hands on this book via piracy—“through ✨other means✨,” as they put it so adorably—and I confess to being somewhat I-really-must-sit-down bemused at the notion that these “✨other means✨” might somehow mitigate their grievous situation.7
All this said, any of us might be proud to put in a hard day’s writing and come up with a kicker quite as kicky as “I’m in Florida[,] if that matters.”
Bless.
Today, I must note, was revving up to be a sort of “Diary of a Copy Editor” entry, and I’ve got all kinds of wry comments and for-examples scrawled about and waiting to be organized, but clearly I was distracted. I’ll be back soon.
My gratitude, as always, to subscribers, with particular appreciation, as always, to subscribers who support this endeavor of mine financially. It does make a difference to me on any number of levels, and I am truly grateful.
Sallie, who has at last been freed of her onerous cone, is grateful as well.
Cover photograph: Oliver Reed in The Curse of the Werewolf (1961).
One can never be too sure with Ollie, but this appears to be an after rather than a before photograph.
“YOU MARRIED ME FOR IT!!” —Martha, in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
I do not for one single solitary second think that such a book doesn’t exist, I underline.
Do I think that “let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding” constitutes deathless prose? No. But it’s honest (if tired) prose nonetheless, and if I encountered it in a manuscript I was copyediting I’m sure I’d shimmy past it without hesitation. Unless, that is, I encountered it a second or a third time in the same manuscript, in which case helpfully chastising finger wagging would surely ensue in the margins.
For the record, it took me an exceedingly long thirty seconds of squint-eyed confused staring to realize that the word I was searching for was “plagiarism” and not, as I’d first typed, “plagiarization,” which is, yes, technically a word, but come on.
This pad[ding] occurs in Chapter XII, “The Terrors by Night,” and I for one am feeling a great need to read Wyndham Martyn’s The Return of Anthony Trent.
I might have gone here with “clencing [sic],” but as a friend noted yesterday, “clenc[h]ing” is both more obtrusive and also more satisfyingly petty.
Series comma mine, natch.
Are there no lending libraries?, as Scrooge himself might have expressed it.
A facebook group in which I am a small lurker regularly includes screenshots of passages in which the character lets out a breath they had not realized they were holding. It is such a common cliche that readers find them often, sometimes twice within the same novel. I feel sorry for the young person being sued, but alas, bad writing is not the purview of AI alone. And now, pardon me, while I exhale.
I was utterly baffled reading that post - almost as baffled as when I learned that em dashes are apparently a sign of AI(???). Are these conclusions about AI a feature of people not reading, not writing, not being properly taught, or all of the above?
If they come for the oxford comma I give up.