“Short: No! We’ve never used AI and never will.

Long: Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! We have never and will never use AI in any way for any creative process. That includes writing, editing, and any art. (We actually don’t do the art, but our publisher Penguin RandomHouse hires real artists. Our cover artist is Perry de la Vega and he is truly fantastic. He also does the maps inside!). We're very serious about our work, and the whole point of writing and sharing stories is to connect with other people. Art is a uniquely human endeavor and there is no way a LLM can offer the same experience, because a Large Language Model like ChatGPT only reshuffles existing words based on an algorithm. It cannot create. In addition, LLMs (or AI, or whatever you may call them) are based on the STOLEN WORK of human artists. As writers, we will never condone stealing the efforts of our past and present colleagues.

So we can promise that every word you read of Shady Hollow (or indeed, anything else we write) is 100% human, brought to the page by massive amounts of caffeine, sleepless nights, and highly advanced procrastination techniques like rewatching whole seasons of Murder She Wrote while nomming lots of salty snacks.

You're right to be concerned about the increasing prevalence of AI-generated books. It will not slow down or stop as long as the slop-creators believe they can make a buck or two by doing it. We wish there was an easy way to identify such works, but the fact is that unless a prompt is left in the text, there will be no clear “tell”. Because LLMs were trained on existing works, they mimic those works. So that’s why elements like em dashes show up — because hundreds of writers like Emily Dickinson used them, and writers still use them. Look! we just used one to honor our girl Emily!

As you clearly know, the only real way to tell if a book was written by a person is to do a little research and see if that person seems real. However, we know several authors who are very private and rarely online, so even that may not work. If it helps: Books published before 2022 are almost guaranteed to be human written, because most regular people didn’t have access to tools that could quickly generate text until around 2023.

We appreciate that you care about what you’re reading and want to be sure that you’re getting what is advertised. Again, while there are no humans IN Shady Hollow, we can promise that Shady Hollow was written BY humans. So go forth and read about Vera and Lenore and Orville and Joe with confidence. May you have many happy hours in Shady Hollow.

Cheers, Jocelyn Cole and Sharon Nagel w/a Juneau Black”