Aug 10, 2026 · 1 hr 9 min · 11 segments
Welcome back WITS listeners! Join Elle and Kay this week as we discuss Tumbled by Skye and Philomena MacKinnon. WITS Smut Scale: 🐙🐙 This week, we're feeling a bit despondent regarding AI news…
So an article in The Atlantic renewed the controversy surrounding H.M. Wolfe's popular novel, Daggermouth, with the subhead provocatively claiming, quote, "Daggermouth could be the first best-selling novel partly written by a chatbot."
Oh, geez.
While the article does contain what amounts to a footnote acknowledging that there is no definitive proof that Wolfe used any AI tools to write the book, the majority of it relies on a single AI detection tool and a study that hasn't been peer-reviewed to claim that there's basically no way the book didn't use AI in some capacity.
Overall, it just made me sad.
I've said before that we've already lost, and this discourse really solidified it for me.
Yeah.
We'll never know for sure, and, and denials have no weight anymore, and any usage that there is will be heavily hidden because people want to preserve their careers.
And this is just the world we live in now, where an AI can perform with skill that's potentially indistinguishable from a human's.
Here's the thing with this.
I know
... to make that claim.
It's, it's bizarre because, like, on the one hand, on the one hand, it's newsworthy to talk about the allegations, right?
Yes.
It is, it is newsworthy to discuss both sides of the discussion.
It is, it is newsworthy to speculate about what comes next and whether we have just entered an era where there are going to be some books that are AI-generated, and there are gonna be some that aren't, and, like, the marketplace is just gonna be where we duke it out to see if they're any good or not.
Yeah.
But the way that this article just asserts-
Hmm.
Yeah, like-
It, it was very...
It...
Like, and a lot of people are, are talking about, like, the serious issue with specifically t- attacking a Black author and no one [laughs] else.
Like-
So an article in The Atlantic renewed the controversy surrounding H.M. Wolfe's popular novel, Daggermouth, with the subhead provocatively claiming, quote, "Daggermouth could be the first best-selling novel partly written by a chatbot."
Oh, geez.
While the article does contain what amounts to a footnote acknowledging that there is no definitive proof that Wolfe used any AI tools to write the book, the majority of it relies on a single AI detection tool and a study that hasn't been peer-reviewed to claim that there's basically no way the book didn't use AI in some capacity.
Overall, it just made me sad.
I've said before that we've already lost, and this discourse really solidified it for me.
Yeah.
We'll never know for sure, and, and denials have no weight anymore, and any usage that there is will be heavily hidden because people want to preserve their careers.
And this is just the world we live in now, where an AI can perform with skill that's potentially indistinguishable from a human's.
Here's the thing with this.
I know
... to make that claim.
It's, it's bizarre because, like, on the one hand, on the one hand, it's newsworthy to talk about the allegations, right?
Yes.
It is, it is newsworthy to discuss both sides of the discussion.
It is, it is newsworthy to speculate about what comes next and whether we have just entered an era where there are going to be some books that are AI-generated, and there are gonna be some that aren't, and, like, the marketplace is just gonna be where we duke it out to see if they're any good or not.
Yeah.
But the way that this article just asserts-
Hmm.
Yeah, like-
It, it was very...
It...
Like, and a lot of people are, are talking about, like, the serious issue with specifically t- attacking a Black author and no one [laughs] else.
Like-
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