I’m a novelist — cheering the $2.4M AI book deal that should open everyone’s eyes

The publishing industry is in an uproar this month as agents and editors alike confront a mysterious new literary talent: artificial intelligence.

The ruckus began when first-time author Jerry Falade, whose crime novel “Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body” reportedly drew a massive $2.4 million publishing deal in a fierce 14-way auction, was suddenly dropped by both his publisher and his agent over suspicions he’d used AI to write the book.

Falade denied the charge and cried anti-black discrimination.

But the incident should force us all to confront a far more interesting question than Is this racist?

It’s time to ask ourselves: What is literary creativity — and to what extent do we actually care whether humans write the books we read?

Falade gestured at this question in his self-defense.

His manuscript, he complained, had “passed through first readers, second readers, editors and acquisitions teams at numerous publishing houses . . . It is difficult to believe that every one of those experienced professionals would have failed to notice” any telltale signs of AI.

Precisely.

Falade’s agents — highly respected players in both the US and the UK — even now call his rejected book “an incredible manuscript that dazzled us.”

Minotaur, the imprint that won the right to publish it, is a power player in the crime and thriller space.

If consumer AI has now become powerful enough to create manuscripts that industry leaders believe to be potential major sources of serious revenue, why not lean into it? 

The people who jumped at Falade’s book have years of demonstrated business acumen behind them; there’s no reason to doubt their instincts on its bestselling potential, whatever its provenance. 

I write what is called “literary fiction,” a genre as much as horror or romantasy (while rarely selling as well as books like Stephen King’s “Carrie” or Katee Roberts’ “The Dragon’s Bride”).

Other “literary” authors have already won public plaudits for AI-assisted work — though they’ve been upfront about its use: Stephen Marche wrote his novella “Death of an Author” in “collaboration,” as he put it, with AI tools, and downtown-lit darling Sheila Heti has published a series of ongoing interactions with her AI interlocutor Alice. 

Yes, there could be copyright issues at play in the Falade case; current law restricts its protections to human output (though it doesn’t bar AI help).

But legal intricacies aren’t driving the literary world’s angst.

No — more likely this is just shock and horror at being so publicly fooled. 

Their positions nominally depend on keen talent-spotting abilities and penetrating insights into manuscripts; now it looks like any wiseass with a ChatGPT subscription can take them for a ride.

As a “literary” novelist, I’m not especially upset at the idea that an AI book could win such a dazzling sum at auction.

Anyone capable of pulling off such a (frankly hilarious) coup must be an astute judge of current haute-middlebrow taste and a steely risk-taker — rather like the provocative Dutch novelist Arnon Grunberg, who managed to win a first-novel prize twice by writing a second book under a pseudonym.  

Note, too, that in the art world, from the bottegas of the Renaissance to the modern workshops of Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami, outsourced artisanship has a long and even illustrious history.  

More to the point: Would fans of, say, the alien-invasion-reality-TV series “Dungeon Crawler Carl” mutiny if author Matt Dinniman turned out to be an elaborate hoax by Sam Altman?

What about readers addicted to what novelist Norman Rush once called “uppermiddleclassics,” like the well-starched books of Louis Auchincloss or Barbara Pym?

Or those who snap up whatever the MFA Industrial Complex churns out?

Books, even the greatest and most immortal ones, lead a double life as works of art and as consumer goods.

It could hardly be otherwise in the age of mass literacy, as even serious “literary” publishers understand: Hence their endeavors to make their books voluptuously satisfying physical objects. 

And think of the writers themselves.

Acclaimed novelist Brandon Taylor has written movingly about the endless, immiserating private difficulties that constitute the act of novel-writing for him.

As he concluded in a memorable 2020 LitHub essay, “Writing a novel is like setting your life on fire for no reason other than to see what part of it is flammable.”

Surely modern technology can help here. 

However Falade’s saga ends, his book is the third in just the past year to have raised suspicions of this kind — which means that many, many more AI works have already passed undetected due to lack of publisher vigilance.  

So the inhabitants of the wonderful world of culture may find AI novels sacrilegious; they may find them merely amusing. 

But they need to accept that these books have already come to stay. 

Sam Munson’s most recent novel is “The Sofa” (2025).