People Are Offended by This Mention of AI in my Book, and I am Here for It

Image from human photographer Emilipothèse for Unsplash.

Dear Readers,

Not everybody knows this, but I’m super active at the Authors Guild, where we are suing multiple AI companies (like OpenAI) and also helping to execute the settlement authors won from Anthropic. This committee work has kept me on long monthly calls where I hear the nitty gritty about how those lawsuits function, and what the A.G. hopes to achieve for authors—which is no AI training without consent and compensation!

All legal avenues are being explored: legislation, class action lawsuits, and more.

Upshot: it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that I am better informed about AI’s harms than the average reader. And I’ve given hundreds of hours of my life to the fight.

Meanwhile, I published My Kind of Guy this year, and the book has done really well. In the (fictional!) story, the very lonely hero uses his phone to ask an LLM for dating advice. And what happens? The bot gives him terrible advice, and Beck considers throwing his phone across the room. It’s (supposed to be) a moment of pure comedy, and it sprang from my own frustration with AI’s ubiquity, and its inability to solve the very real problems that humans have.

In the story, Beck has to do the hard work himself. And he does! That’s how he gets his H.E.A.

Well. This spring, someone showed me a Reddit thread where readers were complaining about that moment in the book, and equating it with (I guess?) the author’s too-easy acceptance of AI. “I was going to read it but now I won’t,” someone said. “She’s going on the banned list,” said another. Etc etc.

For a long moment there, I was really upset that my joke hadn’t landed, and that readers would actually believe that this author wasn’t smart enough to understand AI’s harms. I struggled.

Now that I’ve had a while to consider it, I have a brand new perspective. I’m so encouraged that some of you find the casual use of chatbots insidious. When I wrote that joke in 2025, I made made it from a place of despair. The ubiquity of chatbots in the news and on customer service pages and students’ homework assignments felt so crushing. And inevitable.

But it’s not, right? If Beck’s stupidity is not okay with you, that is a good thing for the world. You are angry, and you’re willing to say so. The tide can turn. We can show these companies that we’ll vote with our feet. That creators deserve respect, consent, and fair pay.

So thank you. Thank you for reading my work, and thank you for making me think even more deeply about a topic that’s important to me.

Friends, it’s messy out here in author land, and I’m trying my best. If this book didn’t hit your funny bone in the right direction, maybe the next one will. I’ll be over here writing it in the same slow way I’ve written all of them. Send coffee.

Love from New Hampshire,

Sarina