Disney's $100m Mistake

0:00The rest is entertainment is presented by Octopus Energy. Now can I tell you something cool that Octopus Energy do if you ring them and you have to be put on hold because they know who you are they know your birthday. The Hold Music is the best-selling single from the year that you were 14. That's quite cool, isn't it? 1988, yes. I love this. Exactly. I've looked into it for you. Do you want to know the best-selling single in the year that you turned 14? So this would be your Hold Music on Octopus Energy. It is Yaz, The Only Way Is Up. What do we think to that? Well, Yaz and the plastic population.

0:31Yaz and the plastic population. Oh, of course. Do you know what? I sometimes think the plastic population did not get their due. They don't get their credit, do they? you know I need to ring it to Octopus now and just listen to it you can choose to say oh I don't want to have any whole music at all absolutely yeah you can you can do whatever you want what animals what monster okay it might be a really bad song but what monsters don't choose to listen I have to say to the song yeah I love that I hope we're going to do this for me in another episode but then but then we find out if I yeah I think I'm considerably older than you aren't I not that much what it's like two three years yeah yeah you'll be saying uh and the best-selling single in the year that you were 14, Richard.

1:08It's Cumberland Gap by Lonnie Donegan. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home. With agents who close twice as many deals, when you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at Redfin.com. Own the dream. Every soda's got something to say. Cola's brag. Probiotics give TED Talks. Then there's Mr. Pibb. No pitch, no promises, just bold cherry bringing the flavor.

1:51Bold kick of cherry. Hey, yo, Mr. Pibb.

1:58Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And me, Richard Osmond. Hi, Marina. Hello, Richard. How are you? I'm all right. I wouldn't want to be entertainment right about now with the grilling we're about to give it. Absolutely. We're preparing to run the rule over it all. We've got quite a few fun things to talk about. We have. We're going to talk about AI in books. Some people are using it. A couple of high profile examples of that. A couple of big fools on the way. We're talking about that. We are talking about big fools. It's an amazing story. If you know the story, you're going to love it.

2:30If you don't know the story, I think you might love it even more. The star of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and the new season of The Bachelorette has just brought both of those franchises down in one go. We're talking about how? What a take, Dan. Shall we start with AI in books? We've got two stories we want to talk about. Shall we start with my story? Because you want to talk about Matt Goodwin. I hope our audience understands that this is a story I find impossible to take seriously at any level. You've virtually been bouncing in your seat all morning because you wanted to talk about it. But Mia Ballard, who is an American author, self-published author, who wrote a book called Shy Girl, which is, I don't know, listeners, if you enjoy your femgore horror, but it's firmly in the femgore horror genre about a character who is kidnapped and kept as a pet.

3:21Listen, it's femgore horror. As I say, she was a self-published author, published this. and the way publishing is now, I've spoken a lot about self-publishing. It's an amazing... Don't be sniffy about self-publishing because how many of the actual publishing's hits now come from it? The well of creativity out there is absolutely huge and publishers have been going to that well more and more and more to just take stuff that they know already is popular and publish it themselves. So traditional publishing has started, you know, going into self-publishing, taking these things off the shelf almost, repackaging them, putting them in bricks and mortar shops and making a lot of money out of that.

3:59The other thing that's happening is self-publishing, quite apart from the top end of it starting to make a huge amount of money for people. The other thing that's happening is it's been absolutely flooded with AI. Because this is a world in which you expect to pay 99 cents for a book and you expect an author to do 10 books a year. These are some of the things that happen in self-publishing. And so it's absolutely rife for AI. Also, absolutely no barriers to entry into this market. You don't have to go through an editor, don't have to go through a publisher, doesn't have to go through anything legal.

4:33You just write it, format it, put it on the Amazon store or lots of other places you can do that as well. So on one hand, all this self-published stuff, on one hand, traditional publishers saying, oh my God, some of this stuff is really selling. At some point, the following was going to happen, that a traditional publisher, in this case, Hachette, one of the absolute biggest publishers in the world, took this book, Shy Girl, by Mia Ballard, said, we are going to publish this, published it in the UK. It appears it has been written or certainly heavily amended by AI. And Hachette have accepted it, pulped it, said, this is absolutely unacceptable.

5:17There's all sorts of other stuff going on in there. Can I ask you a tiny thing about it, which I was quite interested in. Okay, so when they take it, they say, we're going to publish your book. We're going to properly publish your book. Sorry to use the word proper, but just differentiate here. Traditionally published. Traditionally publish your book. They said, we are enjoying refining her book with her. So does that mean it's not the exact text that went self-published because you've now got an editor and they're going to say, by the way, it really drags here or something in the nicest possible way.

5:44it's going to have to be a bit different for our purposes but now you have a book deal and now you're going legit and blah blah i mean as we will discover it's actually slightly a halfway house because it's not one of those ones where they're involved the publisher's involved right from the beginning and is able to sort of have meetings and you know is heavily invested in it but they will do some due diligence editing and then a light edit but you know essentially they know people like this book and we're reading it yeah and there is a mood afoot in publishing which i think is quite right of why would we impose what we think a book is on a book that is already so there's it's a light touch but the key thing is there was a reddit thread started about two and a half months ago that started raising questions about this and started saying look i'm reading the first chapter of this mia ballard book and it looks a lot like ai it's reading an awful lot like ai tell me what the signifiers were because we know we know some of them in nonfiction writing.

6:46Like, it's not X, it's Y. It's exactly the same. So there's an emotional flattening. It doesn't do nuance and peaks and troughs very well, other than within individual sentences. Within individual sentences, it can actually go, you know, the light shone like darkness was never there and the darkness shone like light was never to be. It does that sort of thing all the time where you go, oh, hold on a minute though. It doesn't actually make any sense. It does, every single noun will have an adjective. I mean, it absolutely overwrites that sort of thing. Every action has a simile. Every single one of them.

7:21It will not leave a single piece of action alone without, you know, describing what it is a bit like. There's lots of lists of three, something X, something Y, something Z. Now, all of these things, every writer does this. So many. There's a lot of M-dashes. I think people have worked out now, you can just go through and say, take out M-dash. It's really harsh, especially for digital natives who've grown up in these kind of worlds. You absorb the writing style. I mean, I hope I don't, but I feel as a journalist, I'm waiting for someone to say, your column's AI and it not be. I know we'll get to a whole section of discussion on that.

7:57This is why it's a really interesting thing because a lot of people will say, yes, but that's how people write. And particularly that's how neurodiverse people write. And all of that is true. And you've been trained on those people. Every single one of these things, these tropes, are things that writers use. However, they don't use it all the time on every page, which is what AI does. It does the same thing again, again, again, again. A human writer will always, at the end of a chapter or the end of a section, just go, okay, how is my reader feeling now? Was that too dense? Do we need a bit of lightness of touch?

8:31A real author is going, what move would surprise my reader next? What move would move my reader next? Well, AI is thinking, what word would normally come next? It's all they're thinking. And so it doesn't differentiate throughout the whole book. So I've talked to a lot of editors and agents this week. Because part of this whole Mia Ballard story is someone put all of her, put this work through an AI, you know, scanner and said, oh, it's 78 % AI or something like that. I didn't meet a single agent or publisher who uses one of those AI detection things. They use their gut because they're reading writing all day, every day.

9:08And a lot of these people have been doing that for 40, 30, 20 years. I mean, it's just what they do. They absolutely understand it. They understand that writers can use all of these cliches, but they get to a point where they can read five pages of text and go, this is not working for me. Even cover letters and cover art and things like that. So the Mia Ballard thing, a lot of people have now come out in her defense and say, oh, no, but if you put Frankenstein through an AI generator, it says it's 100 % AI, mind, all of this stuff. It seems that this is a fairly clear-cut case that Hachette went to Mia Ballard and said, we suspect that this is AI generated.

9:49She has said, this is her quote, she said, someone in my writing group offered to help. She'd done a draft, Mia Ballard. Someone in my writing group offered to help and assured me she'd do a thorough job. So I trusted her. In the process, she also changed a lot of the wording and encouraged me to lean more poetic because that's my background. And I listened. I should have done one final careful pass before publishing. And that's on me. Essentially, she's saying, I gave it to somebody else, and they use ChatGPT to edit it. She's published previous books, which don't appear to have had AI assistance.

10:20So this is very, very different. So Hachette have pulped it. They said, we're not going to publish it anymore. Hachette in the US, which was about to publish it, has pulled it as well. And it's the first example of this happening. It's the first example of these major publishers being duped into doing an AI helped novel. She's pursuing legal action, Mia Ballard. So maybe perhaps, listen, perhaps there's an entirely innocent explanation for all of this. And certainly if there was AI involved, it's not the biggest crime in the world. We don't like it, but to have it escalated like this must be absolutely insane for her.

10:55But this world of self-publishing, I follow lots of self-publishing groups and I find them very, very, very interesting. And you can see the panic amongst them because certainly all the human beings are doing their own work. You see the panic where they go, yeah, but I use Grammarly to help with my grammar sometimes. Because if you don't have an editor or a copy editor, it's due diligence. Does that mean it's AI? And on the other side of things, there are people who will type in a prompt, go and make a cup of tea and come back and they've got a book and they'll publish it and we'll do 200 books a year.

11:26so there's no way in the future that these books are going to be ai free because people are going to use tools to help them if if they're not in traditional publishing so it is uh beholden on our publishers and i think this is a good news story to keep an eye out for these things the world of self-publishing is going to be in trouble because there is so much ai stop and there's so much of it. But there's so much human creativity out there as well. So I just hope people who are self-published are not disheartened by this whole Mia Ballard thing because it's one thing, it was found out, it is obvious to almost everyone who has read this book what the situation is.

12:12So is this the start of a huge avalanche of AI books that are going to be in your bookshops? I don't think so. I think the exact opposite. I think there's a real kick up the backside for the publishing industry. I think they're all going, oh my God, thank God that was Hachette and not ours. That would be something to behold. Yes. Charge of the lightweight brigade. Yeah. We have another thing, which is everyone being accused of using AI, which is something different. And now it's become absolutely a thing that you can beat anyone with. And as you say, these... I'm dreading someone saying it. I obviously have never written a column with AI, but I'm always thinking that someone can just...

12:42It's like when someone turns around and says, oh, you've plagiarized this idea or something. It's like the worst thing you can say if you really care about those things. Well, as I say, these detection things don't particularly work. So that's not something, you know, there's no point putting everything through those because it'll flag everything. And they're often designed to get you to sign up and get met. You know, they're kind of scams. I don't want to say they're all scams, but a lot of them are scams in their own way. But I was speaking to an agent who had a client who had a book out last year.

13:05First book, debut books, a really big deal. And in the first week, they were accused of having an AI front cover. So they said, your front cover is AI, which is a huge thing in self-publishing. Yeah. Lots and lots of AI front covers. And, you know, the writing community are very good at understanding that if you want to be protected, we also protect artists. And so they're very, very against it. So there was this huge sort of uproar. Fortunately for this author, the actual illustrator who had drawn that front cover that people were accusing of being AI had done a time lapse photography of her drawing it.

13:40Oh, my God. So she had absolute proof of doing it. But in future, because this is the way that AI, this is the way that public genuinely, the only thing that really publishing is really thinking about AI is can they come up with their own IP without having to involve human beings, give it to a jobbing writer, have it written and then own all of everything. So something like My Oxford Year, which was come up with by the publisher, Julia Whaden, who's an amazing writer, wrote it. But the publisher owns an awful lot more of that than they would if Julia Whaden had come to them. so if you are a publisher and you sit at home with ai and it comes up with project hail mary for you for example which is the andy way book biggest selling book in the world this week so it comes up with that for you you give it to a writer and suddenly you own project hail mary and so i keep hearing this in publishing that well they would just do that wouldn't they would cut out the originator but and we go back to that time lapse photography if that happened say project Hail Mary was an AI thing and a publisher sort of came up with it, gave it to a writer, comes out is a huge hit.

14:43I go, I don't think, I'd like to know how you came up with that publisher because you're not somebody who comes up with good ideas. How did you come up with it? And they go, oh, I just thought of it somehow. No, I need proof because if AI does come up with it, if AI came up with a Project Hail Mary, the publishers would not own it. There is no copyright in something that AI came up with. So I'll just go and do Project Hail Mary too. as easy and someone else does project how mary three so this thing of we are going to have to be in a position as i say as we rebuild this industry after this hurricane has blown through where we find a way to prove that we originate our own ideas i'm gonna wear a gopro to write my column but people god that would be unwatchable i've seen some unwatchable things in my life I thought that would be up there with, you know, some of the worst of Guy Richards.

15:34But we're going to need a simple piece of blue chip software that is able to show, to prove that A, we came up with an idea and then B, that we wrote it. And now I feel very fortunate. All these writers I've talked to the other day said, my God, thank God I started writing before this all came out. You know, I was talking to Lee Child. He goes, thank God. I mean, he said he'd written all of his books before AI came out. And he goes, I never have to worry about it. But if you're a younger writer now, you are absolutely going to have to answer this constantly throughout your whole career. And so just some way, like the illustrator with the time-lapse photography, is just saying, here is me drawing it.

16:09We're going to have to have a thing that says, here is me writing it. A publisher is going to have to accept that. A publisher is going to have to sign legally to say, yes, you did that as well. Or if they give you a thing, they are going to have to sign something to say, I didn't use AI to come up with this. but I do think this is one world where we we want human beings and so we'll just find a little way a little gold standard of how to say human made like when you go to a national trust gift shop you know and there's a little pot of jam and the the person who made it signs it you know it's an artisan newspaper Colin art is exactly that exactly that can I make one more philosophical point yes which is the AI industry I mean it stole everyone's books okay so anthropic and OpenAI, it scraped everyone's books and has used them in their large language models.

16:56There is a feeling among some writers still that what AI is doing is thinking, this is going to be a brilliant way for us to write books. Oh my God, we've got all these books, so we can copy them and we can do our own versions of books. And that's never been the game for AI at all. The reason they scraped all of our books is because they just wanted a huge repository of fairly well-constructed sentences. They're not in the business of, oh my God, we can write books here, because there is no money in books. If you look at the industries that AI can be going into and are going into, you know, medicine, shipping, all of these things, insurance, these things that are multi, multi trillion dollar industries.

17:35Books, they don't care. They used us. They used us just for our words, just so they can train people how to write emails. And then they moved on. But they've left a mess behind them, which we're going to have to deal with. And by we, I mean publishers, writers, self-published authors. But I think we can deal with it. That's the truth of it. Readers want to read stuff written by human beings. Human beings still want to write books. Publishers want to support that industry. So the anthropics and open AIs of this world, we're still going to sue them. Don't worry about that. They're absolutely, they've stolen from us.

18:07If you're worried that, yeah, it's going to get better and better at writing novels, and soon they're going to be indistinguishable, that doesn't seem to be the direction that AI is going in. AI, its selling point is to be accurate and concise and boring. Its selling point is not to be radical and different and creative. There's no money in that because the shipping logistics industry don't want that from their LLMs. Open AI, Anthropic, they're not interested in books. It's our business again. And we as an industry can just get on and we can build something that is real and true and human and that people will, I think, value even more because of what's happened.

18:48Okay. Well, I've got a couple of counterpoints to that in my next case study. This is the business about Matt Goodwin. I'll give you a posted history of who Matt Goodwin is. He used to, I mean, I don't know if he still calls himself an academic. He used to be an academic. He actually co-wrote a really interesting book in a research book with another academic who's great called Rob Ford called Revolt on the Right. And that came out in 2014. By the way, if you read that book at the time, you could basically essentially predict that Brexit was going to happen. It was really interesting. It was like an analytical look at how there have been so many unmoorings from traditional kind of voter bases that there was potential for that.

19:27Anyway, since then, he's been on a little bit of a journey rightward, if those directions still make any sense anymore. He's got a political sub stack. He stood in Gorton and Denton and the recent by-election. For reform, right? Yeah, for reform. He lost the Greens. He's sometimes described as reform's in-house intellectual. Anyway, he published, self-published again, which I think is interesting, recently, just really recently, last couple of weeks, a book called Suicide of a Nation with the subtitle Immigration Islam Identity. And he is saying that it's selling amazingly because it's number two on Amazon or something like that.

20:06It's now in the realm of Jamie Oliver cookbooks. Okay, challenge. It's not, this is not the air fryer and he knows it. Citation needed. Citation needed. Okay. So a political writer called Andy Twelves has suggested that this book is AI generated and it's got sort of, or to some degree AI generated. It's got made up quotes from like Cicero, Livy. I mean, they should be glad people are still talking about them. But anyway, and some of them, by the way, a lot of the stories simply cannot take it seriously. So apologies for all the people who've been taking it very, very seriously for the last week.

20:37And that there are AI hallucinations in it, and chat GPT sourcing and so on. He did come up with this epic nickname, Matt GPT, which I'm sorry, it's like one of those Trump ones. It's like, oh, it's so good. Unfortunately, I can only think of this person in this way now. Anyway, Andy 12 challenged him to a debate on, or maybe Matt Goodwin challenged him to a debate, which happened on Friday night on GP News. I know I've used this quote before, but I remember in the 90s watching a dating show, American dating show, and they said to the woman, what sort of men do you like? And she said, I like men who fight in bars.

21:10I remember thinking, oh my God. Okay. I like men who challenge each other to our debates on news channels. On TV news. Getting lango. And I think it was resoundingly won by Andy Twelves. I mean, nobody really watches these things. Probably all the inside Beltway people watch it, but it exists like all of this stuff just to be clippable, which is kind of relevant to what we're talking about here. What I am very much into, and I pretty much think we're going to talk about Taylor, Frankie, Paul in this way, Matt Goodwin is just posting through it. He's not, and everyone's like, you should, they tried to destroy me.

21:48They've tried to destroy me. They're making me stronger than ever. My book's now at number two on the Amazon charts, which I'm going to come to you in a second and ask you what on earth are you? But people have just been like, oh, he should go away and think about it. I've see genuinely people who would regard themselves as credible thinkers saying, you know, Matt should go away and actually consider what's happened here. It's like, wake up. Okay. It's 2026. Why would he? Yeah. Politics has been posed shame forever. Okay. This is good for him. Okay. I'm really sorry. People have spent the whole weekend saying he's been totally destroyed.

22:20Rubbish. Okay. You're so wrong. Okay. Nonsense. Okay. It's really interesting how the right has taken so much of what the left did in terms of online stuff. Like the left were, you know, that kind of online victimhood, all of that, which was originally definitely very much a preserve of the left. The white have now just taken that, weaponized it. They're so much better at it. What even is this book? I remember when my eldest son was tiny, like three months old, he had a cloth book, something about a monkey, you know, it squeaked, it crinkled, blah, blah, blah. And I remember thinking, oh my gosh, he's got a book already.

22:58And then it's like, wake up. What are you talking about? It's not a book. It's like a paginated toy. It's just got some things like this. That's what books are. Yeah. What Matt Goodwin has written, he hasn't written one of these treatises, even something like Liz Truss's Let's Save the West. It's nothing like that. How's that going? It's aimed at the Facebook audience, which I mean skews older, if I can put that. And it's a paginated piece of internet. That's all. It doesn't have to be the same as what you think some whatever book is. I went to sit with my parents this weekend and you know, like many people of that generation, up next to the landline on the wall is useful numbers.

23:37And it's, you know, me, my sisters, the GP, you know, nice Mark Taxi, David Hare, not the playwright, David who cut the hair. Who does the hair? Yeah. Ray Plummer, you know, useful numbers. Ray Plummer the playwright? Yeah. Useful numbers. This is just useful numbers, this book. It's useful. I don't even know if they're true, but people don't mind about them being true. This is my counterpoint. No one is going to care about this in a few years' time. But this is not the book industry. No, I know. It's just a random outlier. This is not someone who buys... The people who are buying this, they may also buy some novels a year.

24:17I don't know whether they do or don't. I suspect Probably not. It's a different type of audience. It's one of the things they might sell in Waterstones, a bit like they might sell all the games and the toys and the packs of cards and the books of stamps. It's a thing. It's a paginated piece of internet. And also, you know, Matt Goodwin's living is Matt Goodwin now, as so many people in this era. So his job when he wakes up every morning is, I know how much money I earned last month. I've got a rough idea because I've got this amount of people following me on Substack and there's not much churn.