Author response:
Lena juggles lesson plans, bedtime stories, and plot twists—sometimes all in the same day. A teacher by day, a writer by night, and a mom 24/7, she crafts paranormal romances with magic, mystery, and just the right amount of chaos. When she’s not wrangling students or characters, she’s probably drinking coffee and pretending it’s a potion for extra energy.
Hi everyone,
I want to openly and sincerely address something that’s come to light regarding my book. A prompt was recently found in the text. It’s something that should never have made it into the final version. I want to apologize deeply to my readers and to the writing community.
The truth is, I used AI to help edit and shape parts of the book. As a full-time teacher and mom, I simply can’t afford a professional editor, and I turned to AI as a tool to help refine my writing. Teaching wages make it hard enough to support a family, and writing has been a passion project I pursued in the small pockets of time I could find. My goal was always to entertain, not to mislead.
That said, the appearance of an editing prompt in the final book was a mistake — one that I take full responsibility for. It has unintentionally sparked a broader conversation about AI in creative work, and I understand the concerns. I’m taking this seriously and will be reviewing the book carefully, making corrections where needed, and being more transparent in the future about my process.
To my readers: thank you for your support, your honesty, and your patience. I’m learning from this and will do better. To the wider community: I’m sorry.
Big “I’m a mom everything I do is excused because my motherhood” vibes.
All her books seems to be free on digital format and just about $3 on printed paper, and doesn’t seem like even for free, a lot of people read it. So it’s not like a big scam or something, I doubt she really makes any money with this.
What bothers me about this is that the author fraudulently presented the book as her own work. Doesn’t matter to me if she used AI or hired a ghost writer - claiming you wrote something you didn’t write is fraud IMO. I’ve never understood how ghost writers are legal.
Art of the Deal.
Tony Schwartz, ghost-writer of The Art of the Deal, who spent hundreds of hours with Trump, has called him, “the worst human being we’ve seen in a long while: no values, no beliefs, not a single charming redeeming quality.”
🦭💨
or hired a ghost writer
Isn’t that the entire point of hiring a ghost writer?
Isn’t what the entire point?
Their goddamn ghosts maaaaaihn
buckethat wearing, three quarter lengths with red tinted sumglesses, 1990s conspiracy theorist voice
It’s bad enough that they are using AI to create their content, but don’t they even proof-read it before uploading it? It seems like the most basic requirement, but they don’t even seem to be bothering with that.
real authors have editors. If you replace the author with an ai, you still need an editor. There is no version of the current style of ai that can replace an editor.
If only someone had created a proofreading AI.
Prompt: proofread the draft of my novel at a 6th grade reading level.
Hate this title, how about:
“A novel by author Lena McDonald, accidentally leaves AI prompt in published version.”
Or, more accurately, ‘a novel that is at most partially by Lena McDonald’.
Or “a novel published as authored by Lena McDonald contains AI prompt”
“allegedly written”
lol, way better!
I guess I realise now that the value of something is not what people believe it to be. It is the length of suffering and effort the creator went through.
Something something something
🌍👨🚀🔫👨🚀
I think that’s where the world of art appreciation is now quite visibly breaking along a divide that has existed for a while. Some have always just valued the product: means be damned, if the end is enjoyable enough. For others, the process matters; for some even more than the result.
The latter group seems larger, though they may just be more passionate about their views and accordingly vocal (personally, I suspect both are the case, but I don’t know of any solid evidence).
Such is the way of new technology: it challenges traditional values. That doesn’t mean those values are without merit or have to be overturned, but I think it’s valuable that they’re challenged at least.
Here’s to hoping they stand the test.
The future is now, right?
I don’t know if it’s necessary a bad thing. Presumably these people were enjoying the book until they read this. It’s kind of like the invention of the printing press. Sure, the content may not be artistically crafted any more, and there may be waaaay more slop. But I bet we will end up getting way more high quality content too.
It helps you get up to the baseline but will never make you great.
I disagree.
While AI might help at systemising and/or summarising already existing information, I wouldn’t rely on it at all for any creative thought. And what’s worse, the more people spare content like this, the more tolerant they’ll become to it, bringing the overall quality down.
I don’t know if it’s necessary a bad thing. Presumably these people were enjoying the book until they read this.
How can we presume that?
All we know is that these people were promised a novel written as art by humans and were baited and switched into getting an algorithm.
It’s kind of like the invention of the printing press. Sure, the content may not be artistically crafted any more, and there may be waaaay more slop. But I bet we will end up getting way more high quality content too.
If we’re still in the betting process for whether AI might one day potentially be high quality then it sounds like you understand that today it’s not a viable product to write novels with.
It is absolutely nothing like the invention of the printing press
🔥👄🔥 There should be severe consequences for this.
It would suck for the author, Lena McDonald, if anyone who searched for
“Lena McDonald author”
found out about this story.
I get what you’re doing but they can just change pennames
They can, but that would at best be a hard reset on their reputation as an author, and unlikely to work long-term
Leave your guess for how long we’ve got till AI apps are spammed everywhere.
Also for no reason in particular:
They don’t mention enshittification - I think Doctorow popularized the term later - but this is a perfect example of a process that contributes to the phenomenon.
I had never thought about it in these terms, but they repeatedly mentioned curation, and it’s so clearly a fundamental topic in today’s online world.
This was an incredible video, thanks for sharing. It gave me a new perspective to consider.
My son and I laughed our asses off over that presentation. Brilliant but kind of disgusting.
The vibe coders and every person using an LLM can’t complain about it. It’s fair game.
Well, you certainly can complain about it and still use it, when your livelihood requires you to either use the tech, or get left behind by those who do. Speed and turnaround time wins over skill and quality.
that is not true. Speed and turnaround NEVER wins over skill and quality. You need skill to produce stuff fast that is also of value.
Almost. A sudden shift from skill and quality to speed and turnaround wins out in the short run, just long enough to make number go up, cash the checks, and take the golden parachute out while leaving your underlings and consumers holding the bag.
Ah ok you’re comment was descriptive… while mine was idealistic.
AI can be ethically used in writing. This is not an example of that. People need to get into the “AI as a tool” mindset. And capitalism causing greed is part of the issue of course.
Writing is a rare form of communication, borderline unique to humans. Because of that, to me, it’s fundamentally unethical to have “AI” “write” anything. It’s insulting to me on a base level, particularly when used for communication.
Sad disabled person who use AI tools to help communicate noises.
AI can be a fine tool to get writing inspiration, as with programming. It’s not fine as used in this article’s example.
We could also use a model or 2 trained on ethical data.
Until then its pretty easy to argue all ai is unethical.
Would citing all the training sources satisfy the spirit of attribution licenses like CC-BY?
