What happens when a writer is accused of using ai
In a highly-publicized media spectacle, debut author Jerry Falade’s major publishing deal that started with a bidding war ended abruptly when he was accused of using AI to produce his book. Industry insider Kathleen Schmidt had the opportunity to talk to Jerry about the devastating incident and gave him an opportunity to share his side of the story. Here’s the opening to his essay on her Substack:
ME AND MY AI AGAINST THE WORLD
by Jerry Falade
It takes months, years even, to write a book. It takes AI-detection software two minutes to ruin your life’s work.
I know because a software report nearly ruined mine. My name is Jerry Falade, the author of Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body. This is one of the hardest essays I have ever written. Long before AI meant Artificial Intelligence, it meant something else to me: AFRICAN INTELLECT. Africa has produced extraordinary novelists, from Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o to Chimamanda Adichie. For me, that intellect is most intimate when expressed through my language, Yorùbá—a highly lyrical language rich in proverbs, aphorisms, metaphors, parallelism, and “not X, but Y” constructions. Many of these features are now treated as AI artifacts.
