SCARILY WRITTEN

Publisher Pulls Horror Novel After Readers Raise Major Problem

There were concerns about Mia Ballard’s “Shy Girl” since it was first published last year.

A publishing company has nixed plans to release a book amid allegations that large parts of it were written by AI. The Hachette Book Group announced Thursday that the horror novel Shy Girl, by Mia Ballard, will not be sold in the U.S. in May as planned, and will be pulled from sale in the U.K., where it was first released last year. Hachette said the decision was made after the company and its Orbit U.S. imprint conducted a “lengthy investigation” into how the book was written. “Hachette remains committed to protecting original creative expression and storytelling,” the publisher said in a statement. Ballard denied that Shy Girl, about a woman forced to live as a pet by a man she met on a sugar daddy website, was written with the help of AI, suggesting it may have been used by someone else during the editing process. “All I’m going to say is please do your research on editors before trusting them with your work,” she said. Allegations about how the book was written have appeared online since late last year, including a YouTube video posted in January that has gained more than 1.2 million views.