Last autumn, Antonio Bricio, an engineering consultant who lives in Mexico, finished a draft of his first novel, a science-fiction thriller about a government conspiracy to bury the history of humanity’s first contact with alien refugees.

After querying 20 literary agents and getting a string of rejections, he spent several months furiously revising it in the hope of one day landing a publisher.

Now Bricio worries that the already taxing process of getting a publishing deal as a debut author has become even more fraught. He fears that agents and publishers will avoid taking risks on unknown authors because of concerns that they might have written the book using artificial intelligence.

The panic and paranoia over AI-generated books exploded last month when a leading publisher, Hachette, decided to cancel the release of a horror novel, Shy Girl, by Mia Ballard, in the United States over evidence suggesting that it had been partly produced by AI. Hachette also pulled the book in the United Kingdom, where it published Shy Girl last year after Ballard initially self-published it.

Ballard denies using AI to write the book, which sold almost 2,000 copies in the UK; she says an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version of the novel had used the technology.

“This controversy has changed my life in many ways and my mental health is at an all-time low and my name is ruined for something I didn’t even personally do,” she wrote in an email to The New York Times last month. She added that she could not elaborate on the way the book had been edited because she was pursuing legal action.

When Bricio learned about the cancellation of Shy Girl, on social media, his stomach dropped. He says he does not use AI to write, except to occasionally translate a stray word or phrase from his native Spanish into English, in which he is also fluent, using the AI translation program DeepL. But he wondered what an AI detector would say about his work.

So he paid for a subscription to Originality.ai and uploaded a chapter of his novel. The detector was 100 per cent confident that he had used AI in some way.

Bricio searched for the phrases that had tripped up the detector, deleted some sentences and reran it. This time the program said it was 100 per cent certain that a human had written it. Eventually, Bricio had a chat with a customer-service representative, who told him that if he received results that incorrectly flagged his work as AI-generated, he might need a different model of the program.

The back and forth only left Bricio more unsettled. The Originality.ai reports on his draft showed that adding or deleting even just a few sentences produced wildly different results.

“What if publishers or agents start running these AI tools on everybody?” Bricio says. “Everybody is going to walk on eggshells from now on.”

As the publishing industry wrestles with the intrusion of AI into nearly every aspect of the business, there seems to be little consensus over what publishers can or should do to regulate how writers use the technology. But many agree that the current state of affairs is untenable.

A growing number of writers face unfounded suspicions of AI use. Others use AI without disclosing it. Many readers feel confused and wary, not knowing whether the books they’re reading were written by a human or a machine.

Quite a few self-published authors have been called out for obvious AI use and pilloried by readers and fellow writers as a result. But the Shy Girl controversy could prove to be a turning point for the entire book business.

In the wake of the novel’s cancellation, many readers and authors questioned how a leading publishing company failed to catch signs of AI writing. Commenters on Goodreads and Reddit had complained for months about what they called obvious evidence of chatbot language. The scandal has prompted some readers to question how much publishing houses vet the work they acquire.

“We’re reaching this era of distrust, with no easy way to prove the veracity of your own writing,” says Andrea Bartz, a thriller writer who was a lead plaintiff in the US class-action lawsuit brought by authors against Anthropic, which agreed to a settlement of $1.5 billion, or more than €1.25 billion.

Bartz recently put some of her own writing into Ace, an AI checker, and was startled when the program labelled her work as 82 per cent AI-generated. It then offered her a solution: “Would you like to humanise your text?”

When Bartz wrote about her experience on Substack, dozens of writers chimed in. “I guess that’s what happens when your books were stolen to program AI,” the novelist Rene Denfeld commented, noting that an AI-detection program had also falsely determined some of her writing to be AI-generated.

“It’s got to be a wake-up call for the industry,” says Jane Friedman, a publishing consultant.

Most big publishing houses don’t have clear-cut rules around AI use for authors, operating instead on trust and the expectation that writers will be transparent. But with the many ways AI is seeping into book creation, from research to editing to the composition of sentences, there is confusion over which forms of AI use cross a line – and a heightened fear that AI writing can, and will, steal past professional editors.

When Rachel Louise Atkin, who reviews books on Goodreads, Instagram and TikTok for thousands of followers, first heard about Shy Girl on social media, it sounded like a book she would love – a gripping and twisted feminist horror story. She devoured the book in a day and recommended it widely. She said she was shocked to learn that it had been pulled over evidence of AI use.

“If I knew for definite that something was written with AI, I would have avoided it,” she says. “I think we should be able to make the choice if we want to read something that was written with AI or not.”

Authors, meanwhile, often feel threatened from all sides. The ever-increasing number of books published each year, including those written with AI, makes it more difficult for writers to find an audience in a fractured and oversaturated entertainment marketplace. On top of that, authors who steer clear of AI now feel pressure to prove their human bona fides – with no great options for doing so short of livestreaming as they type.

Some writers are adding a logo to their books and websites that says “human authored”. The certification, offered by the Authors Guild in the US and the Society of Authors in the UK, allows authors to attest that they wrote their books without using AI to generate or substantially shape prose. While, in the US, the Authors Guild does not independently verify authors’ claims, writers may be subject to trademark violation suits if they violate the logo’s terms of use.

AM Dunnewin, a self-published author of horror novels, registered for the certification and put the symbol on her website: “I thought, maybe having that certificate could be a safety net, letting people know that it’s my work.”

Readers who picked up Shy Girl were among the first to spot signs of AI generation in its pages, and they clearly didn’t like it. Some writers said they found that encouraging.

“If they are going to spend money on a book, they want it to come from the author’s brain and heart and not a computer that’s robbed the writer’s brain,” says Laura Taylor Namey, who writes young-adult fiction. “I applaud that.”

But others fear that more AI-generated books will slip through the cracks. And as technology improves, the telltale signs of chatbot prose might disappear.

“I’m really not looking forward to the day when readers can’t tell the difference,” Bowen says. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times