It Took a Publishing Scandal to Expose a Broken Industry and the Rise of AI Slop Books

Mia Ballard, a woman living in the UK, had self published a book called Shy girl in February 2025. The book is about a desperate young woman who meets a guy online and is now being held hostage as his pet. It became successful until readers started to question if it was AI slop.

Still, one of UK biggest publishing houses, Hachette, loved it so much that Ballard’s book was taken off the self publishing shelf and was marketed and published by it.

This week The New York Times had contacted Hachette citing evidence that the novel appeared to be AI generated. A day after that, Hachette pulled it out of the UK book shelves and has canceled its release in the US.

There are just so many questions about this controversy. See, this is not a diss against AI. I use LLMs to research and sometimes to summarize long form content for a quick overview. What I don’t do is, use it to write content for professional copy or for my blog.

First of all, sad to see that a publishing house waited until a magazine like NYT had approached it with proof and questions. Most importantly, how did this manuscript pass the desks of agents, editors and the big publishing house? Why does it take the reader to point out the glaringly obvious.

Reddit posts, X users and BookTube influencers have been talking about it for weeks. And turns out its not her first infraction.

The NYT article doesn’t mention how their journalists discovered this was AI generated. But, I am sure they had proof because Hachette did what it did.

There are so many ways to spot AI writing. Some readers are saying AI generated text feels like Purple prose. Wikipedia says that purple prose is overtly melodramatic and fanciful writing. Purple is immoral, undemocratic and insincere. Someone commented,

One thing I’ve seen that really stuck with me is pointing out an LLM cannot comprehend context or subtext, and therefore writes EVERY SINGLE SENTENCE as if it HAS to make an impact. It cannot “build” because it doesn’t actually understand what it’s spitting out.

AI writing is intended on checking all the boxes for all the classic stylistic attributes of good writing should be like. In the process, it goes in circles, making the point in multiple ways, often repeating itself. It uses listicles heavily and doesn’t have a human tone to the long complex sentence structures.

All ChatGPT and other LLMs know is that they have to use metaphors and similes to sound creative and in the process, it becomes exactly what it is, slop.

Read the below out loud if you want and you will get the point.

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.

Yikes.

Amazon has a limit of 3 book uploads per day. And that’s proof that the self publication industry has been dealing with this AI generated content for a while. Publishing on Amazon requires checking the box YES or NO to the answer for if AI was used in the creation of uploaded manuscripts.

Some people might question, why AI creativity is bad. It is bad because its not coming out of a human brain and even I can generate something seemingly glorious using a prompt and don’t have to necessarily read someone else’s prompt engineered slop.

One of the comments said,

I’m happy to see a publisher pull an AI-generated book. I hope it has a chilling effect on people trying to sell AI slop. If you can’t be bothered to write it, we can’t be bothered to read it.

So true! Give me a break with this AI slop content already. And apparently the genre is “femgore”. Well, whatever that is.

The worst part is that even the trigger warning on the front page looks AI generated.

Even the cover photo was something Ballard has admitted to have cropped from a picture on Pinterest. And some have pointed out that the full image of that dog was artist Whyn Lewis’ artwork. Is there anything legitimate about this book and the author??

Ballard has released a statement.

This controversy has changed my life in many ways and my mental health is at an all time low and my name is ruined for something I didn’t even personally do.

She claims that she had used an external editor before self publishing and if there is AI in it, it is due to the editor’s work. She’s currently pursuing a lawsuit. But, wasn’t she supposed to read her final book before it went to the printing press?

And, seriously, who writes like this? “for something I didn’t even personally do.” At this point, I wonder if this simple statement was also AI generated and if Ballard herself is not a figment of someone’s AI imagination. Only time can tell or not.

If you would like to read about the original investigation by The New York Times, the gift link is HERE.

As someone rightly said, this is the whole point.

I think the root of the problem is that publishers are buying self published slop that sells well without vetting it for quality. This book would probably not have made it through a traditional editing process, but Hachette just wanted a shortcut to a hit.

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