The game is rigged, the banker is cheating. So I broke the rules. How to Win a Million Dollars and $#!T Glitter was a joke, a paper I wrote using AI to win them over Survivors (They didn’t cast me). In the end, I won the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award 2026 for this. I believed every lie Ronald Reagan ever told me. A generation made Grift the national pastime and then voted reality TV into the White House. If the American dream is a lie, we must play by our own rules.
On the first page of my book, I make a deal with the reader: I will “lie, cheat, and steal,” and I mean it. But memory is a fickle friend. And I end up getting a barrage of reviews that scream, “I feel cheated.” But the critics and the juries? You love me! The Publishers Weekly BookLife Prize rated my debut 9.5 out of 10. Kirkus called it “an exuberant life story written with humor, verve and heart.” And (not to spoil the ending) everyone knew I was using AI. Besides, all the stories from my life are true.
That should have cleared things up. That wasn’t the case. As soon as I show an agent or publisher how the magic trick works, they disappear. Phew. The room becomes quiet. Everyone is afraid of an anti-AI public. An honest writer is a liability. The work is human. But I wrote it with a typewriter, and no one wants to buy that honesty.
At the awards conference in Portland this spring, I saw that every AI workshop was standing room only. Publishers are running AI in their own workflows while trying to maintain moral authority over how authors use it. The Dutch group at Simon & Schuster is testing AI to translate novels into English. Amazon is beta testing a complete AI language studio in Kindle Direct Publishing. HarperCollins also produces audiobooks with synthesized voices and has licensed some of its nonfiction backlist as AI training data, reportedly to Microsoft. Bloomsbury put an AI-generated archive image on the cover of Sarah J. Maas.
I am a painter by profession and have read Maas’s books. The irony is not lost on me. Apparently. A machine taught me what an em-dash was (and how to stop using it). When it generated garbage, I had the words changed again. On this cover, Bloomsbury says they didn’t know the machine was there. Fine. I did that. But if big publishers keep getting away with “Oh, I didn’t know that,” who are we really policing?
Ask Mia Ballard. The detection company Pangram set her novel to music Shy girl Be 78% AI. She denied its use and said that someone she hired to edit the book may have introduced it. Hachette canceled the US release and canceled the British copies anyway. A big deal, percentage wise.
Run this article through the same detector. I did that. The result was 82% “AI generated”. Generated? A machine corrected the punctuation and discussed the structure with me. I wrote the ideas, the argument, the confession. It judges the style and then decides authorship. So an editor is now considered a ghostwriter? You tell me which 18% is mine.
We punish people for looking like robots and reward the robots for looking like us. It was never about protecting literature. It’s about who gets elected from the island.
I am dyslexic. I can’t spell “again” correctly. Maybe, maybe, maybe My brain knows the word. Not my eyes. I couldn’t afford an editor. I never had a literary agent and being a publicist was a pipe dream. So I used AI to reach whatever was just out of my reach. It was an editor, a brainstorming partner, a beta reader. AI has not lowered the bar for talent. It lowered the barrier to entry.
I understand what the industry paranoia is really about. It is not theft of art. Capitalism rarely makes business decisions based on morality. I’m not a judge. I also have a product to sell. I spent a decade in Silicon Valley, cryptocurrencies and NFTs, watching how sycophancy changed the markets. AI is the first time sycophancy has entered publishing. The problem has never been whether AI can write. A person is always in this process. The danger is the digital yes man. It shows you that you are brilliant until you stop resisting. Until you stop thinking. I know. I’ve done it before and been taken to task for it. Bad writing doesn’t come from the machine. It comes from the author’s mind as AI blandishments take over the process and you hit send on something that still needed human eyes.
Because the machine makes more of what you bring with you. You bring art, you can produce art. You bring $#!T… well, let’s just say you don’t get any glitter. The machine is not an author. Not an artist. Not a friend. I show up with my voice, my words, my vision and fight with it to do the work better. Daily. We have to make the point. That’s the work.
Jane Friedman, one of the most trusted voices in publishing, called me out in her analysis of AI and book pricing, taking the author’s side: “I would rather treat authors as professionals who decide on their tools and creative workflows and then make judgments based on the outcome rather than the process.” Assess the output. The industry is doing the opposite. It judges the confession. The IBPA Awards and National Indie Excellence Awards did not restrict AI-powered work. Three IBPA judges read the finished book, disclosure and all, and awarded it a medal. Foreword’s awards excluded AI-generated content, so I never entered. The Authors Guild now offers a Human Authored certification based on the honor system.
But I keep the receipts. I built a second brain, Claude, connected to an obsidian vault, plain text files on my own hard drive. It isolates my projects from each other and keeps track of all seven of my manuscripts. I can be accountable for my process, which is more than any certification checkbox can say. I’ve even developed a call to remove the AI style from my own writing, not because I’m afraid of being blamed, but because the style itself is now toxic. It removes tricolons and neat metaphors even from sentences I’ve handwritten.
If honesty costs more than hiding, you don’t get less AI. You get less honesty. Publishing is just the first industry to figure this out.
I’m not afraid that the machine will replace writers. The machine is a partner. It reflects me, it doesn’t replace me. The industry holds AI workshops during the day and votes off authors at night.
I will continue to disclose. Not because it’s worth it. That is not the case. But once the detectors fail and the policies rot, a writer telling you the truth is the only signal left.
We’re all in on the game: more money, more status, more validation. And I’m no different. I just confess. But these days in America, everyone has a get-out-of-jail-free card. Except the honest ones. The game was rigged from the start. So… will you beat the system? Or let the system beat you.
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https://fortune.com/2026/07/22/award-winning-memoir-author-ai-detector-publishing-hypocrisy/
