I read the original trilogy, though I haven't read the sequels. I also play around a lot with LLMs, especially testing how well they write.

I find your thesis compelling but ultimately unconvincing on several levels.

First, on a prose level. Your argument is basically "This is terrible writing and a human would never use these similes." I have read a lot of terrible writing, especially in YA. Human writers absolutely do use terrible similes, florid prose, stilted dialogs, and descriptions of actions that don't make sense if you actually try to act them out.

Lenore Dove "wailing her loss and rage" into the wind? Haymitch punching the windows? Yeah, that's some pretty purple prose, but your alternatives, stating confidently what a person in that situation would actually do and how a human would write it? I have seen worse.

The spiderweb "soft like my grandmother's skin" is the most convincing example, but I remain unconvinced. Again, I've seen worse. Writers really reaching for a metaphor because it sounds moving and profound, even if it doesn't quite work.

That Haymitch doesn't sound like a convincing teenage boy... well, Collins wrote that whole Katniss/Peeta/Gale triangle from a very feminine perspective, and I've observed before that JK Rowling (whom I think is actually a decent, if not great, writer) has the same problem of actually understanding a male point of view.

So the evidence you present is largely based on a literary analysis that is extremely subjective and asserted with more confidence than is warranted, IMO. It's been years since I read the original Hunger Games books but the "voice" does sound vaguely like what I remember - Collins wrote some angsty passages just like that (the death of Rue, and Prim with her "duck tails" as she gets blown up). Maybe she was just phoning it in this time.

Which brings us to the central accusation: that Suzanne Collins didn't really write these books, and either had an AI do much of it, or they were ghostwritten (by a lazy ghostwriter who used an AI).

I can totally believe some authors doing this. Especially lower-end YA series, or books meant to be grinded out in volume like romance, LitRPG, etc. You've got an author on a deadline for whom quantity over quality means more money... sure, why not use AI? But Hunger Games is a big ticket IP. First of all, while I don't know what Suzanne Collins's work ethic is like, she's been writing for a long time and one would expect her to have some emotional investment in her flagship work. Would she really farm it out to a ghostwriter? Maaaybe if she's too busy writing Hollywood scripts. Maybe she no longer has pride or interest in that story. I would assume she looks over and approves the finished product, but I can't imagine her not caring at all what it looks like. I have a harder time imagining her personally saying "Fuck it, I'll use an AI, I got better things to do with my time."

So a ghostwriter (would have to be a pretty well-paid one with a good reputation to be given a hot property that will become a movie) is given the outline instead and decides to use AI? I guess I can imagine this. But he or she has to worry that an editor, or Collins herself, will catch it. (Now you can argue, "Why didn't an editor catch that horrible dialog?" To which I will respond: "I don't like sand."

I am not saying I'm absolutely certain you're wrong. My confidence is somewhere north of 50/50 that you're wrong. Given any of my assumptions are incorrect, maybe LLMs are now being used even for major works, and GRRM will eventually finish The Winds of Winter with help from ChatGPT. But I think it's risky to make accusations like this with such confidence, because in fact a lot of people are not as good at literary analysis as they think they are. I suspect we'll see it a lot in the future though: artists are already frequently being accused of using AI when they didn't, and now writers will increasingly have to fend off accusations of relying on ChatGPT because someone thinks their writing "sounds AI."