Many people have reached out to me for my view on the decision by my former publisher, Hachette, to withdraw the book Shy Girl by Mia Ballard after analyses suggested that up to 80 percent of the book might have been written by AI. Although I don’t have all the specifics, these claims seem highly credible, not least because the author has not made any public case otherwise. If she did indeed write the book herself, fighting untrue allegations would have been a spectacular marketing opportunity.
At a time when AI systems are playing increasingly significant roles in our lives across the board, this individual case raises important broader questions about the relationship between increasingly powerful AIs and human creativity.
I can summarize my essential view on this in two short sentences: Mia Ballard is a Fraud. Refik Anadol is a genius.
Let me explain.
Mia Ballard is a fraud because she put her name on the cover of a book she didn’t, it seems, write. Many of us, myself included, use AI in all sorts of ways in the creative process, including as a high-powered thesaurus and to give multiple options for how a sentence we’ve already written might be edited. Having the AI write most of the book and not being transparent about that is clearly over the line. Hachette, in other words, made the right call.
Having said that, is what Mia Ballard apparently did really any worse than the many celebrities, business leaders and others who have unattributed ghost writers pen their books? I don’t really think so. The issue is not having others, computers or humans, help us but being honest about who did what. This will be increasingly important in our coming world where everyone will have a Ph.D. level ghost writer at our beck and call (who can also solve complex math problems and offer life advice). Our AI systems will never be able to do everything we humans can do, but protecting what is special about us requires being clear about what is and is not human creative output.
Refik Anadol, the boundary-pushing artist whose MoMA installation turned the museum’s own data into a flowing, dreamlike work of forever-changing digital art, is a genius because he invites us to see what becomes possible when human imagination and machine intelligence come together in new ways to create works that neither humans nor AI systems might have created on their own.
My new book (April 21, 2026), The AI Ten Commandments: A New Moral Code for Humanity, sits somewhere in the middle. The book explores my collaboration with GPT-5 to plumb all of human recorded history and the wisdom of our various religious, spiritual, moral, and ethical codes to come up with ten principles for living that, if followed by all of us, would lead to the greatest amount of peace and happiness. The collaboration was so deep, iterative, layered, profound, and even creative that I felt it would be fraudulent to do anything other than list GPT-5 as my named co-author. This will be the major non-fiction work to ever list a human and an AI as co-authors, but it will most certainly not be the last.
My point is that human and human + AI creativity will run a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum will be the Henry David Thoreaus among us, who express from their souls completely apart from technology. At another end will be future versions of Refik Anadol, creating entirely new possibilities in collaboration with our new machine capabilities. (My new novel, Virtuosa, which will be released early next year, explores how all of this might play out in the context of classical music. Teaser: it plays out over a single night at the Berlin Philharmonic.)
This is all not dissimilar to the futures of healthcare, agriculture, advanced materials, and computing at the intersection of AI, genetics, and biotechnology, which I explored in my previous book, Superconvergence.
There can be no doubt that incredible advances in science and technology are challenging our notions of what it means to be human. This is a very big deal. But we should not lose sight of the fact that controlling fire, domesticating plants and animals, industrialization, secularization, the Enlightenment… also did the same. As I’ve written repeatedly, the challenges may be new but the values we will need to navigate them wisely are in many cases very old.
As we race into our technologized future, we’ll be making a grave error if we don’t carry with us the best of our humanized past.