Author who lost $2M book deal over AI concerns claims allegations are racially motivated: Definitely innocent!!!

An author who lost a $2 million book deal over allegations he may have used AI to write it is denying the claims, saying they are racially motivated.Jerry Falade, a grad student at Southern Methodist University, spoke out on Tuesday after his own reps pulled the plug on the sale of his first crime novel, “Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body.”“Definitely innocent!!!,” he wrote in an Instagram story.“They CAN’T and WON’T stop this Black boy’s light from shining!!,” he wrote in a second post.In a series of social media posts, he said claims against him are part of a historical pattern of diminishing the intellectual contributions of people of color.“If you’re a Person of Color and you secure a lucrative deal in history, someone, somewhere, will accuse you of using AI,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, he added that white authors “brag about using AI all the time.”Fourteen publishers had bet on the US rights for Falade’s debut novel, and he ultimately inked a deal with Minotaur, a Macmillan US imprint for a reported $2 million. HarperCollins Publishers won the UK rights.Not long after the deals closed, Falade’s agent at Europa Content notified the publishers in a letter that he could no longer support the book after concerns were raised about the author’s possible use of AI to write it.Falade told the Wall Street Journal that he only used AI for research, “and not for writing the book itself.”He explained that he relied on a tool that let him run an open-source AI model on his own device, to obtain details on topics like what chemical someone might use to dissolve a human body.The tool he used doesn’t keep or share extensive search histories, raising eyebrows.

But Falade said he used that method because of the grizzly subject matter of the questions for his crime novel — which he felt could raise red flags if they were tracked.The scribe said that none of the editors he met with during the book-sale process asked about AI usage, noting that h...