Happy Monday! 

I’ve fallen down the Shy Girl rabbit hole, an AI novel controversy that has rocked the bookish internet. I’ve recapped it to the best of my ability below, but this whole debacle has made me want to become a better reader. I’m not sure that I’m as close of a reader as some of the people who have caught onto this book’s AI mannerisms. I’d like to be! 

I’ve also put the first year of Yap Year’s playlists into one giant, insane playlist, which you can find below. I will be sending the survey I mentioned later this week, so keep an eye out!

While AI fears have been swirling around the literary space for some time now, I mostly assumed the slop would remain confined to the depths of Kindle Direct Publishing. AI is not very good at writing, despite enthusiasts insisting that LLMs are improving. It’s quite formulaic and people have been gradually identifying the telltale signs of AI writing. 

So how did a book with so many of these major tells get picked up by a big publisher? 

Shy Girl by Mia Ballard has been the subject of debate online for months. The story is billed as a feminist horror about a 30-year-old woman named Gia who is held captive and kept as a pet by a man she meets online. It was originally self-published last February and picked up by a Hachette imprint for further distribution. The book was published in the U.K. late last year and was expected to hit American shelves in April. 

Yet, readers on BookTok, Reddit, and YouTube have been questioning whether this novel was AI-generated, or at least assisted. Finally, the New York Times announced last Thursday that Shy Girl had been pulled from shelves following this growing speculation. 

“Shy Girl appears to be the first commercial novel from a major publishing house to be pulled over evidence of A.I. use,” the outlet reported. “Its cancellation is a sign that A.I. writing is not only appearing in cheap self-published e-books that are flooding Amazon but is seeping into even traditionally published fiction.”

Much of the attention around Shy Girl seemed to stem from a BookTuber’s video on the novel, which has received 1.2 million views. Frankie’s Shelf did a deep dive — over 2.5 hours! — into Shy Girl, its lack of story development, its bizarre repetition, and, frankly, its sometimes inhuman writing. They pulled out specific passages that have some of the AI signs that the New York Times Magazine previously shared in December 2025. These include groups of three; an obsession with ghosts, quiet, and humming; the classic “It’s not X, it’s Y” or its alternative “No A, no B, just C”; repetitive word choice (Frankie counted the use of the descriptor “sharp” 159 times across 209 pages); and meaningless, unusual metaphors. 

Ballard told the New York Times that she had hired an acquaintance to edit her book and that person had used AI on the novel. She said she could not elaborate on the details of the AI editing because she is pursuing legal action. 

“This controversy has changed my life in many ways and my mental health is at an all time low and my name is ruined for something I didn’t even personally do,” she told the Times.

It’s worth noting that this is not the first time that Ballard has been accused of using AI to write her books. Readers have also speculated that her self-published horror novel Sugar was created with AI assistance.

I suppose it’s easy to feel like this is obviously AI after being told it likely is. Frankie’s Shelf made a great point that they may not have automatically assumed it was AI-assisted if they hadn’t seen other people suggesting it was. Many self-published works could simply be a product of bad writing, which is far more admirable than simply plugging a prompt in ChatGPT and selling the results on Amazon. 

However, I would expect publishing professionals to recognize these red flags better than I or any other casual reader would be able to. I understand that AI is improving and slowly creeping into every creative field. Also, as the Times reported, it seems like publishing has not decided on its boundaries with AI yet. But from what it sounds like (since it’s kind of impossible to get my hands on an actual copy now), Shy Girl is simply… bad and nonsensical writing, AI-assisted or not. Did that not give any agents pause? 

The premise of Shy Girl fits into the female rage book trend we’ve seen in recent years. It was apparently popular on the Amazon book charts, catching the attention of publishers. So I suppose it looked like an easy cash grab. Luckily, if there’s a silver lining in this, it seems like many discerning readers have the one thing these major tech companies want: taste. Their displeasure with low quality AI writing may be the one boon we have in combating machine-generated works from major publishing houses — even if this kind of literature flies in the self-publishing world. 

Every Monday letter gets a playlist. To celebrate the first year of Yap Year, I made a megamix of the past 52 weeks of playlists. Is this combination of songs nonsensical at points? Yes. But it’s fun! I tried to organize the songs in a way that made a little bit of sense, but I’ll probably continue to rearrange it. It’s 22.5 hours long, so good luck listening to all of it. Put it on shuffle if you wanna get chaotic.

Other things I want to share with you.