Are Current Authors Using A.I.??  Pffft!  At Least They’re Not Plagiarizing | Dysfunctional Literacy

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Are Current Authors Using A.I.??  Pffft!  At Least They’re Not Plagiarizing

May 31, 2026

Did the author of this novel use A.I.? Or are her critics wrong? I wouldn’t know. This isn’t my genre.

Remember the good old days when authors used to get accused of plagiarism?  It wasn’t that long ago. But now plagiarism seems to be out, and using A.I. is in. In the past few months, several authors that I’m aware of have been accused of using AI. in their novels and short fiction.

I’m not surprised that authors are using A.I. Writers have always done stuff like that to get ahead, especially when there’s money, status, or sexual opportunities involved.  Some writers will use A.I. just to experiment.  Some will use it to compare/contrast it with their own writing.  And some will use it to cheat the system.  I’d be shocked if nobody tried it.

Even though I despise the potential overuse of A.I. in daily life, if I were an A.I. author (I’m not, but if I were), I would just own up to it. I would act proud. I would call myself an A.I. pioneer. I would brag about how little time and effort it took me to write my book. I would say that if it’s okay for authors to have ghost writers, then I can have A.I. I’d call everybody else jealous. I mean, I’d be acting like a jerk, and I’d be full of bunk, but if I were cheating by using A.I., I’d go all out.

I’ve seen so much bad writing in my time (I’ve been one of the many offenders) that I know that clumsy writers could be falsely accused of using A.I., turning this into the literary version of the Salem Witch Trials with accusations flying around and innocent authors getting burned at the metaphorical stake. If rival authors and spiteful readers can leave fake online reviews to burn writers they don’t like (hey, it happens!), they’ll have no problem making intentionally false accusations of using A.I. in their books.

"She used A.I.! And she used A.I.! They all used A.I.!" Tompkins Harrison Matteson, Trial of George Jacobs, Sr. for Witchcraft, 1855.

Despite my wariness of A.I., I’m not concerned about false accusations being leveled against me. For one, I don’t use A.I. in my writing. I’m also pretty irrelevant as a writer. Even if I did use A.I. in my writing, I don’t think anybody would care. If a bunch of critics start making that accusation, it might actually make me feel more relevant. I still won’t do it.

Even though there are A.I. detection computer programs to catch potential offenders, I don’t care enough to use one, and I think it’s silly to use a computer program to catch computer generated written content.  To me, bad writing is bad writing.  Besides, most of the stuff that I now read was written decades ago, long before any of this computer generated stuff existed.  My reading material might have been plagiarized the old fashioned way, but at least it wasn’t created by a Large Language Model.

One way that critics spot potential A.I. use is to catch an abundance of meaningless metaphors. A.I. seems to love using meaningless metaphors, which might flow off the tongue when you read them but don’t make sense when you think about them. I’m pretty sure that some authors count on readers being so enthralled with the prose that they don’t pay attention to the word salad (I think that’s the current phrase for it) that is being used. At least that’s why real human authors use meaningless metaphors. A.I. authors use meaningless metaphors because the LLMs can’t be programmed to adjust to every possible situation, so sometimes the LLM has to wing it. And that’s where the fun begins.

Some teachers would rather deal with the alien than with students using A.I. to cheat.

When I was teaching, I didn’t have to deal with A.I., but plagiarism was still a thing. Students thought copy/pasting a paragraph and changing one word was an effective way to fool a teacher and get an A on an essay. I learned early on that accusing a student of plagiarism only led to a strong denial, even when the student was almost (or completely) illiterate.

Instead of arguing with students and parents, I  had students in class hand write versions of their essays from scratch and matched them with the compositions that they had brought in from home. Even though I haven’t been in a public school classroom for years, I think that strategy would still work today (if students are still capable of hand writing) as long as teachers are...