Malin Hay | Chattiness
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1 June 2026<br>Chattiness<br>Malin Hay<br>Share on BlueskyShare on FacebookShareEmailPrint
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Several people I know now refer to ChatGPT as ‘Chat’. They give it human pronouns (Chat is usually a he) and ask it for restaurant recommendations, holiday schedules and relationship advice. Some go further, automating their office admin and getting it to summarise meetings and write reports. Passing off whole chunks of AI-generated text as your own work appears to be on the rise in the publishing world.<br>Last year, Hachette bought the rights to Shy Girl, a self-published horror novel by Mia Ballard, and released it in November to good sales. A Reddit post on r/horrorlit in February by a ‘book editor of twelve years’ picked out several passages that set alarm bells ringing:<br>The bows on my pigtails pull too tight, yanking the skin and stretching my head into something neat, into something pleasing, a quiet violence made beautiful.
My snout dips into the frosting, the sweetness rolling over my tongue, thick and sticky, a flood that chokes but insists on being swallowed. Beneath the pink gloss, the cake falls apart, crumbling into ash that coats my teeth, hollow sweetness that fills me with its nothing . . . His laughter cuts the air, sharp and jagged, a sound too big for the room.
Ballard denies using AI to write the book, blaming a freelance editor, but Hachette pulled it from publication in the UK and US.<br>The other week, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize winners were announced, and by arrangement the winning entries were published on Granta’s website. The winning story from the Caribbean, Jamir Nazir’s ‘The Serpent in the Grove’, contains sentences like this:<br>Coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all. He knew every root that tripped a foot, the snake-curve of run-off, the brittle crumble after drought. He worked it alone and most days the land worked him back, a quiet quarrel older than his father and his father’s father.
The internet smelled a rat. Nazir, who seems to have few publications to his name, describes himself as an ‘organisational transformation and business expansion’ professional on LinkedIn. His long posts are about geopolitics and the ‘AI arms race’. One of them begins: ‘Let’s be clear: the “Cloud” is a physical, terrestrial liability. And AI is pushing it to its breaking point.’ The Commonwealth Prize, which had praised ‘The Serpent in the Grove’ for its ‘voice of restraint and quiet authority’, said that all the entrants had affirmed their work was their own and that the prize operated on the principle of trust. Granta says it will leave the story on its website until ‘definite evidence comes to light’.<br>I thought I didn’t use ChatGPT because I was too clever. I thought that not using ChatGPT made me cleverer. It turns out, though, that it made me very bad at spotting when a text was written by or with the assistance of AI. After the uproar over the Commonwealth Prize, I took a New York Timesquiz entitled ‘Who’s a better writer: AI or humans?’ I got three out of five correct – barely better than a coin toss. On Wikipedia’s ‘AI or not’ quiz, I got seven out of ten, but that was easier because none of the AI articles had footnotes.<br>I’m not the only Chat non-user who can’t tell when an LLM wrote something. Experimenters in the US last year showed nine subjects a series of articles, half written by humans and half generated by ChatGPT, Claude and other large language models. Asked to guess which of the texts were human, the four subjects who rarely or never used ChatGPT in their daily lives scored ‘at a similar rate to random chance’, while the five who used chatbots almost every day at work collectively misidentified only one in three hundred texts.<br>One of the problems with AI use seeping out of business and science writing and into the ‘literary’ world is that literary editors may be the worst equipped to identify AI writing. (It may also be easy to succumb to the pressure to go too far the other way – over-labelling work as AI-generated...