Ballard, an American poet and fiction writer, who writes stories of feminine rage, had initially self-published the novel. However, in mid-2025, Hachette’s Orbit division acquired it for its newest imprint, Run For It, which exclusively publishes horror fiction.
How the backlash built
The reddit thread that set the ball rolling. (Screenshot/reddit)
The conversation began two months ago, on a reddit thread called, r/horrorlit, where a user, u/herendethelesson, who identified themself as a book editor with 12 years of experience under their belt, asked, “Does anyone else think this was written by ChatGPT?”
The user, who had experience with weeding out AI writing, felt that the novel had all the markers of AI-generated text, namely emotionally even and usually emotionally overwrought, next, the overuse of adjectives and weather similes, light and dark metaphors and stock words such as “quiet, chaos, violence.”
In their exhaustive list of markers of AI writing, they also included linguistic tics such as “something x, something y” for scent and always in bunches of three, and “too x, too y” in every passage. Another hint is that it is too perfect and follows all grammar rules to the T, which is rare in creative writing. Another marker is the use of em dash to “separate two simple clauses.”
The post, which had over a thousand upticks, spun a long discussion with other users chiming in on whether they agreed or disagreed, and how one could reliably identify AI writing. One of the users alleged that in a separate published interview about Shy Girl, Ballard’s answers read as unmistakably AI-generated.
Cataloguing repetitions
The Goodreads page for Shy Girl later stopped accepting rating, edits and reviews.
Story continues below this ad
Another catalyst was video on the popular BookTube channel, ‘Frankie’s Shelf’ (YouTube/@frankiesshelf), which has 1.99 lakh followers. The creator, Frankie, pointed out that the word “sharp,” had appeared 159 times across 214 pages, and had been used to describe abstract concepts such as guilt, the edge of money and the silence in a room. He also catalogued other overused words such as weight (94 times), edge (84 times), hum/ humming always as a descriptor for atmosphere (26 times), rhythm and rhythmic (42 times.)
Observing that bad writing does not prove AI involvement in itself, and that humans can also be formulaic and repetitive, he felt that the novel adhered to a cluster of specific patterns flagged in a New York Times piece about the fingerprints of AI-generated prose in unusual concentrations. “It is an unshakable feeling that a person would not write like that,” he said.
His video had garnered 12.53 lakh views at the time of publishing this story.
Book cover under the lens
Frankie also raised concern over the book’s cover. The cover, which shows a grey-blond dog with a pink ribbon around his neck lying flat offset by a cloud-speckled sky. However the image of the dog had been cropped from a painting by artist Wynn Lewis, something Ballard later acknowledged on Instagram that she had picked up on Pinterest.
Story continues below this ad
Frankie, however, also observed that Ballard’s self-published novel, Sugar, seemed to be AI generated.
Many readers agreed with the assessment and individually wrote to Hachette, demanding the publisher verify whether the book had been written using AI tools. “I emailed them a month or so ago asking if they would verify that the book was not written using AI. I’m sure others did the same,” a user wrote on a separate thread on reddit.
The public pressure and an enquiry by The New York Times proved to be the tipping point, and a day after the query was sent, Hachette pulled the controversial book.
What author said
Ballard, for her part, denies writing Shy Girl using AI. In an email to the Times, she said an acquaintance she had hired to edit the self-published version of the novel had used AI, reallocating the blame.
Story continues below this ad
What is femgore, and why does it matter
Femgore is a subgenre of horror written by women that leans into body horror and female rage. It has been around since the 2010s but has gained a steady followership since 2024. Literary writers covering the genre’s popularity say this trend has gained offers catharsis in a post-#MeToo era by turning the tables on patriarchy in a world where women are perpetrators instead of victims.
The reddit thread that set the ball rolling. (Screenshot/reddit)