AI book witch hunt: BookTok rails v. The Atlantic’s Will Oremus article  on Tuhin Chakrabarty’s study that suggests Daggermouth is partly AI-generated book based on AI detector Pangram & rare…

The Atlantic's Will Oremus published an article suggesting that H.M. Wolfe's novel 'Daggermouth' may be partly AI-generated, based on a pre-print study by Professor Tuhin Chakrabarty that used the AI detector Pangram and rare expression checks. The claim has sparked outrage among BookTok influencers, who criticize the study's methodology, while Wolfe denies the allegation. The article notes that the study is not peer-reviewed and that there is no definitive proof of AI use, but quotes a computer science professor saying it is 'almost statistically impossible' for a human-written book to score 60 percent AI.

AI book witch hunt: BookTok rails v. The Atlantic’s Will Oremus article on Tuhin Chakrabarty’s study that suggests Daggermouth is partly AI-generated book based on AI detector Pangram & rare expressions. H.M. Wolfe denies it. BookTokkers defend her. Will Oremus’s article on “Is This What Comes After AI Slop?, Daggermouth could be the first best-selling novel partly written by a chatbot.” BookTok is a fascinating community. The Atlantic’s Will Oremus may soon found out how fascinating–and fierce. This past week, Oremus wrote a 1,500 word essay, provocatively titled “Is This What Comes After AI Slop?, Daggermouth could be the first best-selling novel partly written by a chatbot.“ Oremus was summarizing a pre-print study posted by Professor Tuhin Chakrabarty; his article was also provocatively titled, “Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books.” Chakrabarty conducted a study on the potential effect of AI-generated books on books written without AI. To determine if a book was AI-generated, Chakrabarty used a combination of the AI detector Pangram which has some false positives and the additional check of looking for “rare expressions” that supposedly are not common in human published works: “We call an expression rare when it appears in at most five Google Books volumes and is absent from a 4.7-trillion-token snapshot of the internet.” Although Chakrabarty’s pre-print study doesn’t identify any author or title of the books analyzed as far as I can tell, Oremus apparently learned from his interview that one of the books that Chakrabarty’s study flagged as partly AI-generated was H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth. And Oremus’s article is almost entirely about the Daggermouth aspect instead of the entire study. Although Oremus concedes that Pangram has false positives and that “ t he study has yet to be peer-reviewed, and to be clear, there is no definitive proof that Wolfe used AI,” Oremus also quotes the opinion of Mohit Iyyer, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland: “it’s ‘almost statistically impossible’ for an entirely human-written book to register as 60 percent AI” as Daggemouth’s book reportedly did. Indeed, The Atlantic’s subtitle reads like clickbait: “Daggermouth could be the first best-selling novel partly written by a chatbot,” insinuating that the book may well be partly AI-generated. Oremus’s article on Chakrabarty AI study enrages BookTok Well, I thought it would be a lazy Sunday but my TikTok feed lit up. Many BookTok influencers were engaged by Oremus’s article on Chakrabarty’s AI book study. I don’t think I’m exaggerating in the use of the word “enraged.” Take a listen to some of the BookTokkers. Warning: the language may contain expletives. Some BookTokker criticized Chakrabarty’s study’s use of an AI detector Pangram: Will AI Defamation Lawsuits Be Next? One BookTokker predicts AI defamation lawsuits may become a thing. There already have been several defamation lawsuits filed by students who faced disciplinary actions by universities for alleged AI work product. I did buy a copy of the book Maybe the controversy worked. I did buy a copy of the book. And, yes, the book is on top of the latest issue of The Atlantic. Is that a sign of how this controversy will turn out?