Sally McGraw Accused of AI Writing: A Ghostwriter's Fight for Credibility

Ghostwriter Sally McGraw received an email stating that multiple artificial intelligence detection tools identified her writing sample as machine-generated. She had not used AI to create the text. After spending more than 20 years as a professional nonfiction writer, she felt angry that her work was dismissed. "I was floored because I had not used AI to generate the text," McGraw said. "I'd written it all myself."

The incident occurred while McGraw was applying for a job to develop a book proposal. She told the client she had written the proposal herself but did not press the issue because she considered the position minor. The client confirmed in an email to NPR that she screened McGraw's work. However, the client said the detector results were not the only reason for hiring a different writer, citing experience and fit. McGraw was paid for her samples but believes the detector results cost her the full book proposal.

Editors are facing a rising volume of submissions. Neil Clarke, publisher and editor of Clarkesworld, noted that a flood of AI submissions has pressured his staff. In 2021, the magazine received about 1,100 submissions per month. By February 2023, after AI agents like ChatGPT and Claude became widely available, that number had doubled. Clarke temporarily closed his submission portal and estimates his own workload increased by 30 percent. "It's introduced an element of mistrust into the process," he said.

Detection tools are not perfect. Researchers published a study in the International Journal for Educational Integrity in June comparing the accuracy of four widely used detectors. They tested 160 academic papers in four categories: entirely human-written, entirely AI-written, a combination of both, and AI material rewritten by a human. Pangram was the most consistently accurate. It correctly identified the use of AI in 37 of 40 papers with combined text and 37 of 40 papers where a human rewrote AI-generated text.

Max Spero, CEO of Pangram, stated in an email that the company's detector can make mistakes, particularly when there is not much writing to evaluate. Chris Callison-Burch, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania, noted that previously published writing can cause issues. Many detectors ask a large language model how predictable a passage is. Language models often find text from their training data unusually predictable. This explains why science blogger Janelle Shane received a 98.7 percent confidence score for a passage from her 2019 book. "This is a clear, glaring, blinking-light false positive," Shane said.

Detectors look for clues in word choice, punctuation, and sentence structure. Callison-Burch said the word "delve," frequent em dashes, and ideas grouped in lists of threes can trigger an AI-positive result. Opening sentences with adverbs like "notably" or "crucially" can also trigger alerts. These are familiar habits for human writers. Detectors weigh patterns across a whole piece, so one em dash or specific word does not necessarily mean a bot was used. An unpublished draft like McGraw's sample could still be falsely flagged based on these stylistic patterns.

The Authors Guild said in May that the use of AI detectors creates an environment reminiscent of witch hunts. The organization noted that a false positive can cost an author their contract and reputation. A false negative, where AI-generated work slips through, can cause readers to lose trust. Clarke said he does not personally use AI detectors to screen manuscripts but thinks certain tools could help overwhelmed editors manage volume if they check the findings. He cautioned against turning suspicions into accusations. "Submissions should end in rejection, not an accusation," he said.

McGraw says the fear of another accusation has changed how she writes. She now avoids certain words and sentence constructions. She occasionally leaves out commas she used to include, hoping the inconsistency will prove a human wrote the text. "I miss my em dash. It was something that I learned in journalism school and I've used it for decades," she said. She worries about facing another accusation when a bigger opportunity is on the line. "I'm bracing for the time when it's an assignment that I'm really gunning for and the outcome makes or breaks me," she said.