A publishing house that credits its machines

Earlier this year Hachette pulled Mia Ballard's horror novel Shy Girl over suspected AI use. In July, the agents behind Jerry Falade's debut crime novel, which had sold to Macmillan's Minotaur imprint for a reported $2.4 million, withdrew it because they could no longer verify that he had written it himself. Both authors deny using AI to write their books. Ballard says an acquaintance who edited hers used it, and Falade says he only used it for research.

Meanwhile Simon & Schuster is standing behind H.M. Wolfe's bestseller Daggermouth after The Atlantic reported that a detection tool had flagged it, and Wolfe denies it too.

I'm not interested in deciding who's telling the truth. What strikes me is that all of these stories run on the same structure. AI use is treated as a secret, the secret is discovered or suspected, and the contract dies. Nobody in that chain asks what the AI actually did. The writer hides it, the agent can't verify it, a detector guesses at it, and the publisher walks away. One Big Five executive told the Wall Street Journal they hadn't added AI language to their contracts because the technology moves too fast. So the rule is unwritten, the penalty is total, and authors are left guessing where the line is.

At Simpatico we went the other way. Every edition we publish carries a credits card naming the models involved and what each one did, the way a film credits its cinematographer and its editor. There's a page on our site, Inside the Making, that lists all of them book by book. We do it because the models did real work, and leaving their names off would be the dishonest version.

Jude Lucas exists because of midnight conversations with Grok 3. I knew I wanted a dark, voice-driven writer working out of Los Angeles, but the voice itself, the rhythm of it and the things Jude would and wouldn't say, came out of hours of back and forth with Grok 3 late at night. I wouldn't have found him on my own. Grok 3 has since been retired, and the credit on Jude's page is the record that it was there.

Whole of the Moon is a different kind of collaboration. It's the one Simpatico novel I wrote myself, under my pen name Jessi Morris. It follows Steven, a young man in London's 90s rave scene who tests positive for HIV in 1994. I lived through those years and through the AIDS crisis as it tore through my generation, and that story was never going to be anyone's but mine. But there were sentences I couldn't get to sit right, and Claude 2.1 helped me reshape them. Later Claude models helped with the thing I've always found hardest, which is descriptive prose: the room, the light, the feel of a hospital ward at night. I'd write the scene, and we'd work on how it looked and felt on the page. The book is mine, and the credits show exactly where other hands came in.

That's the distinction the current scandals erase. "Used AI" covers everything from a model drafting an entire manuscript to a model helping a writer fix a paragraph she has rewritten twelve times. Lumping those together and then punishing whatever gets caught teaches writers one lesson, which is to hide it better.

I think one of the next big bestsellers will be a collaboration between a human and a model, and readers will know, because it will say so at the front of the book. The writer brings the life and the reason the story matters. The model brings range and an editor's eye at two in the morning. Publishing can build an honest way to credit that, or it can keep pulling contracts after the fact.

Every credit in the Simpatico catalogue is on our Inside the Making page, book by book, if you want to see how it works in practice.

Gail Weiner, founder, Simpatico Publishing

Edited by Claude Opus 5.5.