HarperCollins has published "The Disappearing City," co-written by debut author Jamie Kellerman and an AI system, which debuted at number two on the New York Times fiction bestseller list in its first week. The novel's success has ignited a fierce national conversation about creativity, authorship, and what it means to be a writer in the age of artificial intelligence.
Kellerman developed the plot, characters, emotional arc, and themes. The AI generated first drafts of chapters based on detailed scene-by-scene prompts, which Kellerman then rewrote extensively. In a candid New Yorker essay, she estimated the AI contributed "the bones of perhaps 40% of the prose."
The Authors Guild has called for mandatory disclosure on AI-assisted books and is lobbying for new copyright rules that address AI collaboration. Amazon and Barnes & Noble have both added AI-disclosure labels to the book's listings.
Literary critics are divided. Some call the novel "vivid and propulsive." Others argue the AI's contribution is audible as a kind of "narrative smoothness that lacks the idiosyncratic roughness of genuine human creativity."
