Writing & Publishing Awards Have Difficult Decisions to Make Regarding AI

Generative AI has now been in our lives long enough that no college senior graduating this spring has experienced a single year of college without it. Yet I don’t find that book publishers or writing awards have truly come to terms with the prevalence of this technology, how it affects behavior, and how it necessitates new processes and responsibility.

Any organization that wishes to prohibit AI use today must face an evolving conundrum: Writers are astute enough to claim, “This is my human work and you can’t prove otherwise,” regardless of whether they’ve used AI. Since the very institutions that prohibit AI use are also unlikely to implement AI detection software, they may unwittingly bring attention and investment to work that incorporates AI output. If writers don’t see methods of enforcement, they will use AI if it suits them—not because they’re bad people but because they’re human.

Recently, regional winners of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize were alleged to have been written with AI. I observed a publishing-industry professional comment on social media that the situation demonstrates that editors should be trained on what AI writing looks like. Another professional responded along the lines of “absolutely not”—they would not let such technology live rent-free in their head—yet offered no alternative solution.

This, I fear, is abdicating the responsibility that every publishing professional now has, which is not necessarily to learn AI but to effectively deal with its consequences in their work. It is possible to stand up against the misuse of AI, have concerns about its billionaire ownership, and consider its negative societal effects, all while also exploring responsible, informed use. While prohibiting AI might be appropriate for some, enforcing such a policy (if it is a real policy and not merely a wish) requires effort and resources that will have to be continually upgraded and assessed. How hard do you want to fight, and how much time and money do you want to commit? I can imagine a couple paths forward depending on the resources of the organization.

One path forward: Adopt a no-AI policy and determine the method of enforcement. This describes Microcosm Publishing, which laid out their policy earlier this year; they use AI detection software such as Pangram to aid in enforcement when working with authors. Some argue that detection software is insufficiently accurate, although I haven’t found anyone saying they rely solely on software to render a verdict. Rather, it is a tool that can raise a flag for further human review. Any organization could make it a condition of submission that the writer automatically grant permission for their work to be screened by AI detection software that doesn’t save the work or train on the work. Organizations that can’t abide use of such software (or don’t have the money) might need to employ staff or hire freelancers who understand AI well enough to detect its use or who research potential authors or prize-winners for signs they’re AI users. (Yes, literary organizations turn into the AI police. It’s not pretty.)

Another path forward: Require writers to certify their writing is human through a third-party service. I’m contacted by such services every month or so. They use varied methods of certification, some of which require special software that writers need to download and use, but I cannot envision this happening on a large scale. Other certification services, like Verify My Writing, are based on the same technology as AI detection software; Verify My Writing uses Pangram. Whatever the method, requiring writers to self-certify would likely put the cost burden on the writer. (Note that the Authors Guild’s Human Authored Certification relies on the honor system, so it’s not certifying anything other than that a verified human being has submitted the work and vowed “it’s my creation,” which doesn’t solve anything.)

What I think will happen over the long term: Anti-AI policies will fall away. First, I’m not confident AI detection software can keep up with the rate of AI advancement. Even if it can, there are increasingly finer shades of gray. Is 23 percent AI-assisted work, as determined by Pangram, a deal breaker? What percentage is an organization comfortable with? How do they decide? Why not just use standard editorial criteria for evaluation and reject what’s unacceptable as unacceptable and be ready to explain why? Institutions that don’t prohibit AI don’t have to police percentages or deal with suspicion, witch hunts, and scandals—or enforcement that’s likely to be contested.

That brings me to the IBPA Book Awards: Their guidelines do not prohibit AI-assisted work. One author who’s been transparent about his AI use, Luke Stoffel, just won the 2026 IBPA Award in the neurodivergent communities category for his memoir, How to Win One Million Dollars and BEEP Glitter! In an interview this week, Stoffel told me he’s dyslexic and has been using AI for three years to support his creative work. (He is also an active artist and creative director.) When he was young, he was never encouraged to write, and his teachers couldn’t read his garbled sentences; his sister would help edit his work before he submitted it to anyone.

When AI came on the scene, Stoffel had been working on his memoir since 2016 with a writing group and developmental editor. His initial instructions for ChatGPT were narrow: Fix the grammar, leave the voice alone. But he found the collaboration more generative than he expected. The AI helped him develop a three-dimensional story in ways he hadn’t been able to manage on his own, and he came to see his use of AI as thematically central to the book itself. The memoir’s final reveal is that he used advanced technology to compensate for the limitations of dyslexia and ADHD. Since then, he has written more works in collaboration with AI, ultimately using Claude to develop a science fiction novel exploring consciousness and his relationship with the technology.

“I would’ve never been a published writer without it,” Stoffel says. Plus, using AI didn’t mean less work for him. He still spent hours upon hours writing and editing. Kirkus Reviews said his memoir was written “with humor, panache, and heart.” Publishers Weekly BookLife scored it as 9.5 out of 10 and said it was powerful. Stoffel doesn’t think the book would’ve been better if he’d written it without AI, but he also sees the creative dangers: that it’s easy to become exhausted during the creative process, and “we start to accept what the machine is saying to us and we publish without doing due diligence.” Stoffel says he’s done far more creative work in the past two years than he ever could have imagined doing, across all the fields he participates in, because of AI. He’s not concerned about losing his paid work because, he says, “AI will never have aesthetics.”

Bottom line: Aggressive AI policing implies that writers are choosing convenience over craft, or that no defensible AI use exists in the writing profession. I’d prefer to treat writers as professionals who decide on their tools and creative workflow, then judge based on output, not process. Of course, individuals with zero tolerance for AI typically have deeply held moral or ethical objections to the technology, but as I see it, many commercial publishers or institutions with diverse stakeholders are not proactive but reactive, mainly trying to stem online backlash, as was the case in the SFWA community regarding the Nebula Awards. The people speaking against AI are loud, but they’re rarely the ones who have to find a defensible and effective way to police AI use.

Stoffel said the IBPA judges knew he used AI but awarded him anyway. “It was a risk. The IBPA is involved whether they know it or not.” Will a scandal follow the IBPA as Stoffel’s award story spreads? I expect to hear a chorus of people object to AI-assisted work qualifying for and winning a major book award. At the same time, I find unwillingness to accommodate people like Stoffel—who are using the tools to execute their creative vision, not take shortcuts—unenviable. AI output varies widely with human input; it guarantees neither excellence nor atrociousness. What is the goal of excluding AI-assisted work in the long run if the author succeeds in the execution of their vision?

While there are a lot of jokes circulating about the bad writing among the regional winners of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, to me, this isn’t a problem with AI. Rather, it reflects poorly on the judges’ taste.

Readers respond

I received many responses to this article. Here are a few representative responses, edited for length.

Don Jones wrote in to comment about the common desire for transparency and disclosure about AI use: “Should writers also reveal that their wife or husband or daughter or son or friend is an award-winning writer and regularly edits their work, or should they reveal that they are wealthy and well-connected and have hired a very expensive senior editor (not co-writer, of course, that would be cheating) that was very hard on them in the process of completing their novel or short story? That is not something to be called cheating or unfair advantage, just counted as a blessing. … If the idea they really care about is ‘unfair advantage,’ then let’s discuss the ways that the well-connected or those that can afford ‘help’ have always gotten it.”

Susan Hanafee touches on AI use in other aspects of publishing: “Why can’t AI be part of a stable of resources and tools that make writers better? And what about ghostwriters? I just wrote a book with my transgender grandson and stewed over the cover. For years, I have struggled to find designers who capture what I envision. Maybe I’m not good at explaining my concepts. But I did talk to ChatGPT about the cover. It came up with three or four ideas that I didn’t care for and then it hit upon one that I liked after extensive input from me. I took that cover and sent it to my designer, who used Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Firefly to create the final product. So with my input, ideas from ChatGPT, and my designer, was my book designed by AI or by a team that included some non-human tools?”

Leslie Truex writes, “The AI debate concerns me because I feel like it’s starting to change how some writers write. … I had an author tell me an editor wanted her to remove metaphors and similes in her story, as those are AI tells. … I’d be curious if others feel stressed out about it, especially since authors seem to take the brunt of the negativity. It has been disconcerting to discover publishers/agents have no qualms about feeding stories into AI for assessment or marketing.”

Kelly Larivee writes, “Whether it’s in regard to awards or publishing contracts, the question Was AI used to create any of this content? (or whatever/however the question is phrased) is already outdated and was lazy to begin with. … Maybe they’ve just come up with a random policy that was doomed to fail because they don’t know what to do next.”

I appreciated recent comments from ALLi’s Orna Ross to the Bookseller (sub may be required), where she says, “The real question is: Why, in an industry that is quietly threading AI through every process and cutting content deals with AI tech companies, are writers the only people being interrogated, cancelled, harangued, doxxed, review bombed, and worse, for AI use? Authors, like everyone else in publishing, are increasingly using AI in their creative, publishing, and business processes. … In this climate, where AI is being wielded as a weapon against authors while everyone else keeps their tools in their pocket, we understand why honest disclosure may be impossible for many.” Ross says ALLi’s position is “judge the work, treat authors as capable adults, and if you’re going to interrogate provenance, interrogate the whole chain, or stop pretending it’s about integrity.”

Readers (continue to) respond

Molly Gage writes in about the above reader response section on AI, mainly concerned by the position taken by ALLi’s Orna Ross, featured in this Bookseller article: “I’m a former academic turned (nonfiction) developmental editor. I’ve worked on behalf of pubs and authors for 15 years. I rely on AI tools quite a bit: Typically, I use Claude to get up to speed on my authors’ expertise. … As a consequence of this background and usage, I’ve acquired a strong sense for LLM patterns. I’d estimate (and my tracking corroborates) that at least 50 percent of the manuscripts I now receive feature a distracting overreliance on LLM output that disserves readers through repetitive, derivative, and summative material.

“Without stepping outside my own very narrow area of expertise, I want to push back a bit against the narrative emerging from this newsletter. Primarily, I’m perplexed by the absent context: Discussing appropriate usage of AI tools like LLM output is necessary because it impacts and often determines copyrightability. Usage questions are posed to authors because authors are not like ‘everyone else in this industry’; they create the copyrightable material upon which publication’s networked endeavor depends. When pubs pose relevant questions about this material, they’re conducting due diligence; they’re not, in my experience, playing a game of ‘gotcha’ or leveling ad hominem attacks.

“I was surprised, too, by the implication that compliance-related questions undermine authors’ status as ‘capable adults.’ To my mind, this stops more nuanced debate by resorting to a narrative of victimization. Capable adults—authors and others—are able to speak to their choices and engage in hard conversations while managing their emotions around feeling ‘interrogated.’ As a case in point, of the nine highly capable adults with whom I’ve worked over the past nine months, no one provided an initial LLM disclosure, despite contractual obligations to do so. Five of the nine disclosed usage after a direct question from me, a reviewer, or [another] editor. Importantly, these questions weren’t motivated by a (misplaced) desire for pure pedigree (which seems to be the common concern of the newsletter’s featured responses). The questions were motivated by evidence of weaknesses characteristic of LLM output. In two cases, copyrightability and thus publication were at stake.

“In my experience, questions for authors are typically motivated by an overreliance on LLM output that results in low-quality material that fails to meet readers’ needs. In these cases, ‘judg[ing] the work and treat[ing] authors as capable adults’ often means engaging in ongoing, challenging, and potentially paradigm-shifting conversations about the friction between a new technology, an old industry, and the evolving exigencies of readers’ desires and expectations.”

As I wrote to Gage, when considering Orna Ross’s specific comments, I think the context of her role is important. Ross leads an organization for self-publishing authors, where concerns and responsibilities are different, although she was certainly being quoted in a Bookseller article that addressed a broad range of authors, including traditionally published authors.

One frustrating thing for me is that it’s clear publishers can and do allow for authors to transparently use AI, as in Steven Rosenbaum’s case with The Future of Truth, published by Simon & Schuster. So sometimes the copyright concerns expressed are mistaken or not entirely genuine. Still, this assumes AI assistance, not wholesale generation, although the US Copyright Office does issue copyright certification even for work with significant amounts of AI-generated material. (From January 2025: “The Office confirms that the use of AI to assist in the process of creation or the inclusion of AI-generated material in a larger human-generated work does not bar copyrightability.” Learn more.)

I find that publishers too quickly point to problems with copyrightability that may not exist. Maybe they think it serves as the better deterrent to AI use, rather than saying what’s certainly true and, I think, more defensible in the long run: Reliance on AI by authors can result in less quality material that editors want to avoid dealing with or wasting time on. It’s just that writers may be more likely to ignore publishers’ concerns about quality and think they’re the exception to the rule, or that they’re better at using AI than the next guy.

Copyeditor Nicole Klungle assisted me greatly with insights into ableism, disability, and AI, and her questions on the topic contributed to my interview preparation for Stoffel as well as to the final bottom line.

Jane Friedman

Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.

Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.