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’.
lol, way better!
Or “a novel published as authored by Lena McDonald contains AI prompt”
“allegedly written”
The future is now, right?
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.
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.
🔥👄🔥 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
I think you are grossly overestimating the audience of this author. They are a “self published” author whose books are free and not read by many people.
If anything, she will see a massive spike in readers just because of curious people checking her out.
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.
AI can be a fine tool to get writing inspiration, as with programming. It’s not fine as used in this article’s example.
Sad disabled person who use AI tools to help communicate noises.
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?
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.
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.
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.
