The Million Dollar Publishing Plagiarism Crisis

A few months ago, I vowed to write my last and final think piece on AI. The gist was: don’t use AI to outsource your critical thinking or writing skills—it will degrade your skills until you’re more replaceable, not because the AI is better at writing but because AI has actively made humans worse at writing and thinking by relying on it. Alas, there have been so many plagiarism and AI scandals in book publishing — plagiarism and AI go hand-in-hand, it seems— that it is once again unavoidable.

What has me feeling compelled to write about these scandals are some of the long, quite frustrated comments on my most recent newsletter about how editors evaluate submissions. An extremely different response than the first time I tackled the subject about a year ago. The ground is certainly shifting beneath us. There is a bit of understandable rage from some readers and writers that likely has to do with the recent news story of Jerry Falade. Falade recently sold his debut thriller called Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body for $2.4 million dollars, only for the deal to fall through when questions of AI usage were raised.

I’m not one to obfuscate or dance around the matter: common sense says that Falade probably did use AI, but we’ll get to that. There were a reported 10+ bidders involved in the Falade saga, a fact that had DHM readers taking issue with this statement from Friday’s newsletter: “The best or even the merely good stuff isn’t ‘missed’ by traditional publishing.” Their response, essentially: how could the standards be so high if 10 editors are willing to rubber-stamp AI nonsense?

The honest answer is that both truths exist parallel to each other. What is known as traditional publishing, especially in modern times, rarely misses those literary novels readers fall in love with (just go look at your shelf). For every originally self-published The Martian or indie press star like Carmen Maria Machado (both now with Big Five publishers) there are tons more books that people really admire and agree are incredibly good that made their way through the traditional route of the Big Five. There is always the possibility that there are great novels sitting in drawers or untranslated (there probably are some). But these are exceptions, not the rule. Plus, there are plenty of books that are published that are under-read and under appreciated that are legitimately exceptional—publishing may be close to meritocracy in what books are made available not in how authors are paid and books are distributed or marketed. I like what agent Anna Sproul-Latimer wrote a few weeks ago on the matter:

More than a decade ago, a fellow agent whispered this to me over beers: “getting signed out of the query pile isn’t hard if the book is good.”

She wasn’t lying. There are exceptions, of course—BACTERIA COLONIES, DENISE—in the form of future sleeper hits and surprise market-creating experimental work and whatever, but more often than not, that truth applies.

Traditional publishing also publishes a lot of other stuff that is not “the best” or “merely good” stuff, primarily for profit. Books that don’t have to be good but simply must have demand. Now that demand has shifted — readers lowering their standards for quality — traditional publishers are probably publishing more low-quality books than ever. I do share the profound disappoint at the lack of professional standards the editors and publishers involved in the Falade auction displayed in getting into a bidding frenzy for an AI novel. It is embarrassing. You can see in the comments how this lack of professional standards harms the reputation of the entire industry.

Even Falade himself said, “If the manuscript had shown genuine signs of being generated by AI, it is difficult to believe that every one of those experienced professionals would have failed to notice.” It’s quite obvious how this happened: the groupthink of the market. It’s a situation that happens all of the time—a few editors get excited about a project’s commercial prospects and other editors start to assume, often against their better judgement, that they must be missing something.