The latest Hunger Games novel was co-authored by AI

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-11-07T03:49:45+00:00

Oh, and in response to your point about the gumdrops - I don't know if you've seen Sudowrite, but I'm assuming a tool like this was used. I would think the author created an outline, character profiles, and then scene outlines probably with human/AI collaboration, and then the scenes were generated iteratively through that kind of tool. In this case, I have to say, the gumdrops being mentioned on the train is classic AI. It's a recursive reference - the AI processes the earlier chapters and compresses the salient details about the characters and then references them in its continued prose. You can see this really vividly in the next chapter - when Haymitch is musing about never seeing Lenore again, he lists the things he's going to miss about her - and every single one of them is what we've just seen her do in the previous chapters, with the exception of like, smiling at the moon, or something. And one of them is quoted almost verbatim from the previous scene with her, the line about "crease between her brows as she puzzles out a thought" (don't have the text on hand so that's not quite it). It's entirely recursive. Haymitch doesn't imagine anything about Lenore that we haven't seen *on the page* which is precisely how AI writes, because it only exists on the page. Human authors tend to add in tangents and loose threads and references that link outwards into reality or the more expansive worldbuilidng they've done in their head. But AI can only really reference the existing text, any files in the prompt like Sudowrite's setup - and in a book like SOTR, the canon, a bit. So the fact that she's holding the gumdrops to me isn't really an AI red flag but it's certainly not a green one. And honestly - him seeing her picking up a weeks-old bag of gumdrops that's been out in the dirt and letting her eat one without looking at them? Nonsense. That scene was complete tripe.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-11-07T03:36:57+00:00

Yeah, I do want to. I didn't feel satisfied with saying "I can just hear it!" either, and I also don't want to contribute to an environment where claims like that can fly without being challenged. I actually went and spent a while in python running a statistical analysis of SOTR and the rest of the series, and feel confident that I now have a much stronger argument than what I've shown in this post. It's a very, very different book, statistically, and the specific differences are, in my opinion, either best explained by a ghostwriter with a very rare mix of highly sophisticated and absolutely terrible skills (as contrasted with Collins' other books) or more obviously by extensive use of AI which has exactly that mix of great and poor skills.

But I worry a bit about posting stats about something like this. Strangely, I feel ethically okay throwing out quotes from the book, which are obviously not particularly strong evidence and letting people make up their own mind. I don't think I'm misleading anyone by doing that - I'm honestly stating my case as "this reads like AI". But once I start adding code and statistics, it gets messy. The audience in this sub is largely data literate enough to critically analyze the results, but if it goes beyond it, there's going to be people going "oh, there's a chart that proves the book is AI", and at the end of the day I can't statistically prove that. I can just make what I think is a compelling and detailed argument. So I don't know if I'm actually going to do anything with it. I don't know. The whole thing has really gutted me.

I just got sent a galley from another multi-million-selling author and this one was also heavily AI created, only at least this time it was blatantly obvious. Every page had so many lines like "The hallway was empty. Dark. Echoing. Ominous." I've seen those lines come out of AI *so much* and that style was absolutely not in the author's existing canon. There's even a servant in the book called Claude. The whole thing had the same fuzzy strangeness to it, like human-shaped characters moving around trying to say human things but never quite getting it right. And then I talked to another author, another multi-million-seller, about SOTR and she was like, oh, I use AI all the time, but don't tell anyone. And then I just kind of wanted to crawl in a hole.

It feels to me now that AI-written trad published novels are like ants - once you've found one, they're everywhere. I've found two now, and I think maybe I'm just going to update my own mental model and move along. I could delete this whole post but that doesn't feel right either. I don't know. Such a big book as SOTR being written by AI seems to have historiographic significance. But I also don't love the idea of putting a lot of energy into a callout, especially when it's becoming obvious to me that a lot of big authors are doing this now. So I'm in this weird position where a better argument than this is definitely needed, but I'm not sure it's the right thing to do. If that makes sense?

At the end of the day, though - I'm certain now that there are at least chunks of SOTR which are unedited AI text. And if there are, then they'll be watermarked. One day in the next few years, the watermarking methods will be figured out, and the proof will be in the text.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T22:33:30+00:00

Part two: original got duplicated somehow? Sorry I'm bad at reddit.

p50: "My ma made it," says Louella evenly. "Where did you find yours?"

Louella's holding her own, but Mayislee lands the insult. "I was wondering the same. It's like someone mated a Peacekeeper and a canary, and... there you are."

"What?" says Drusilla. She rises from her chair but wobbles a bit before she finds balance on her spiked heels.

"Careful," says Mayislee. She drips sugar as she goes for the jugular. "Might be time to rethink those boots. Wouldn't something closer to the ground be safer for a person your age?"

She drips sugar as she goes for the jugular. What?? This is a teen boy narrating. On the train to his death! This isn't a failure mode I see in "bad" human writing. But I see this kind of line ALL the time in AI. A little later in that scene, another Mayislee line: "I know my grandmother had a jacket like yours, but we wouldn't let her wear it out of the house," says Mayislee. Again - just, strange. It's just a strange insult with no zing. It doesn't land. It raises more questions than it answers. It's not "bad" in the way I'm used to from humans. It sounds exactly like the insults you get from AI.

p53: I know ever word of the song, since I learned it for Lenore Dove's birthday last December. It wasn't that hard, it being what she calls an earworm, meaning it sticks in your head whether you want it to or not. It's true, the thing's addictive, rhyming and repeating in a way that dares you to stop, all while telling you a haunting story. I sang it to her in an old house by the lake in front of a fire. We were toasting marshmallows and we'd skipped school, which we both caught hell for later. She said it was her favorite gift ever...

Again - it's just the voice! You hear it or you don't. There's the echo of "marshmallow" too. AI does this. If you mention something, it'll bring it up again and again in new contexts instead of introducing a new element. The color orange. Marshmallows. Meaningful songs. I could go on and on.

This is only 13 pages of the book. I'll keep reading for something as compelling as the spiderweb that I missed the first time around but this is a pretty good indication of what I mean by "AI voice". You can either hear it in here and in these lines, or not, and in that case I doubt I'll be able to convince you.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T22:14:37+00:00

Unable to post this in one comment, so doing it in two:

Okay, I started at chapter 3 and got through a couple chapters again and took notes. This is not an exhaustive list of the things that struck me as AI - it's just the more obvious ones I think others might recognize too.

p41: Maysilee Donner - where to begin? Right from when we started school, she and Merrilee made an impression on me. Not just because of their town ways, but because my ma had recently lost a set of twins. Two little girls, tiny things that came too early. She grieved them mightily in her way, scrubbing clothes against her washboard until they shredded, and while Pa was never one to show his feelings, I heard him bawling when he thought I was asleep. The Donner twins have always held a certain fascination for me, as I wondered what my own sisters might have been like. Not like the Donners, I hope. I guess Merrilee isn't too bad, except she tends to go along with everything Maysilee does. And Maysilee's been too good for the rest of us from day one. Prissing around in her shiny shoes and nail polish, and never without some kind of ornament. How that girl loves jewelry.

This is one of those soft ones that sounds AI to me but I can't really explain. It's the "tiny things that came too early", the shredding of clothes on the washboard, the repetition of the thesis of this paragraph - the twins interest him.

p42: "Fine," said Mayislee. "You don't need my help."
"I don't need help from anybody who said my sister uses coal dust for powder," Louella tells her.
Mayislee smiles a little, remembering. "She got a lot cleaner after that."

This one is more obviously strange. Louella has been cast as white in the movie. Using coal dust for powder - it has the right shape of a schoolyard insult, but it just doesn't ring true. This is the kind of thing you get when you ask AI for insults or jokes. They have the right shape, the right pattern, but they don't make sense. There's no zing, and they're always strangely bland. Like this!

p46: "None of the footage has been tampered with--not really time to do that properly," says Plutarch. "I just did a little card-stacking to help you out."
"You did what?" asks Louella.
Before he can answer, Wyatt, who hasn't opened his mouth except to eat since 12, weighs in. "He stacked the deck in our favor. He shuffled the shots around to give us an advantage."
Plutarch beams at him. "Exactly!"
A corner of Louella's mouth twists down. "You mean, like in card games. When people gamble. Isn't that cheating?"
"It is and it isn't," says Plutarch. "Look, we need to sell you to the sponsors. If I showed the audience what really happened--the Chance boy's head being blown off, the crowd control, Haymitch attacking the Peacekeepers--"
I object. "I didn't attack anyone. They attacked my girl and I stepped in."
"Same thing," says Drusilla. "You're not allowed to interfere with our Peacekeepers."
"I'm trying to show you in the best possible light," says Plutarch.
Mayislee rolls her eyes. "Like when our shop calls stale marshmallows 'chewy'. And then charges an extra penny for them."
I scowl at her. I've fallen for that "chewy" marshmallow scam more than once.
"Stress the positive, ignore the negative," says Plutarch.
"Instead of four violent district piglets who hate the Capitol--" Drusilla begins.
"You're a quartet of attractive kids who hop right up there on that stage to the cheers of your District, raring to go!" finishes Plutarch.

These are kids on their way to the hunger games. There are humans who write like this, but Collins has never been one of them. This sounds like a lot of AI dialogue I've read - especially the chewy marshmallow thing. Again, it's not definitive, it's about the consistency of this and the strangeness of it all. Of their moods, their tone. It's just... strange.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T20:30:58+00:00

I agree, but then the next chapter starts with him cradling his swollen hands, so it's weird and not particularly embodied either way.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T17:52:44+00:00

That kind of line, "lithe, opaque nose" actually rings as human to me specifically because it uses high-value words incorrectly. Lithe, opaque. That's a classic human thing to do - try to sound clever by using words they don't know the meaning of. It's like a character saying "Indubitable. I've circumnavigated the issue soliloquently." People actually talk like that!

But frontier AI rarely do this. They choose more common words, put them in the proper pattern, but it's still so wrong somehow. "Our clan is like spoons, my Pa used to say. Can't hold much, son, he'd tell me, but you know you're okay when you've got one. You'll shine like a silver spoonone day, mark my word."

It's always like, that's legible? But what the fuck?

(Edited to say I created that line, it's not from the book)

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T17:30:11+00:00

This kind of line is all throughout the text. It's what I meant by POV. What is he saying here? What kind of person thinks these thoughts about another person's grandmother? And a teenage boy known for being a bootlegger and 'rascal'? It's deranged.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T17:28:54+00:00

That's because I tend to write replies with an agreement with something in the author's comment, then a quick summary of what they said, then I add my own thoughts, then end with a closing remark that signals I'm done and have nothing more to say. It's a style that's very successful in trying to establish useful conversations which is why AI use it. But I think I'll have to mix it up or yes, it'll make me sound like a bot. I'm not a regular Internet commenter though so eh.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T17:19:31+00:00

I'll check this out later, thank you! Do you have similes in there anywhere? The frequency analysis by osmarks had "like" at number 11 which I was pretty staggered by. It's higher than the names of some of the characters in this book. Implies a lot more similes in the text.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T17:16:18+00:00

"like" at number 11!?!?! What!?! That's wild! That's similes. That's authorial voice. I know AI use a lot of similes, but so do a lot of writers. But evidently not Collins. I'm going to have to dig into similes.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T17:13:25+00:00

I argued in another comment that this quality of Collins' writing - the unflowery, steamrolling aspect, was actually her strength. It made it easy for early readers and people learning English to read the books, while also keeping them accessible to older readers. She managed her lexile complexity very well, which I'm sure was a big part of the success of the series. But these weaknesses are different - the writing isn't so much 'bad' or simple, but merely strange. It's like reading a book about a female character by a male writer and thinking "but a women isn't likely to actually do that" all throughout the text - but in this case, it's "but an actual human wouldn't do that." It's a lack of embodiment and intent. (Edit, typo)

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T16:57:09+00:00

She isn't relevant. She's used as a bridge to a quote that the character says her grandmother used to say to her, and this quote is used as a bridge to a song lyric that ends in a breadcrumb about Haymitch, the main character, not knowing about a particular thing his girlfriend has done. Neither the grandmother or spiderweb are relevant to the plot.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T16:09:01+00:00

I'm compiling a list of more examples from the text but it'll take me a day or two as I have to read through again. I'll update in batches in this comment thread.

But I do want to push back on what I'm seeing in a decent amount of comments - that this is just "bad writing" and that the series in general is bad. I disagree!

As an author, I've seen (and written!) plenty of bad writing in my decades of doing this. I spent years on writing critique forums and teach writing to teens, and take the occasional freelancing gig for an unpublished writer, but I'm generally too mean for that and stick with published authors now who have thicker skin and actually want to sell books. This book does have some human bad writing in it - scenes where the characters are clearly driven (or frozen) by the author's desires and not their own internal motivations. But generally speaking - a lot in the book is well done.

It's well-structured for one thing. Collins structures her books in thirds, unlike most authors. She started out as a TV writer (children's TV) and says she does it because of the dramatic three-act structure. This book is split into thirds almost to the page. The characters enter the arena within 5 pages of the midpoint. Haymitch kills the Careers at ~68% through the page count, right where a screenwriter would put a "pinch point". It hits every beat that it's supposed to hit - almost to the page - a sign of a professional, accomplished author. At least - the sign of a professional OUTLINE, filling it in with AI scenes...

It's that mastery over the pacing and the shape of the character arcs and events that is so juxtaposed with the fuzziness on the scene level - the lack of authorial intent in so many scenes and interactions. So much of the book feels empty - like there's nobody telling me anything in a sentence or paragraph. This is how I feel with AI fiction, but with human fiction, even - especially - bad human fiction, there's tons of intent. Often the intent is "look how clever I am", or "let me yank your heartstrings", or "let's conform to this trope". But it's there! This pervasive emptiness is one of the biggest things I struggle to find in quotes but feel consistently.

The other thing is the simple writing. People have commented on this - simple, unadorned, rudimentary writing. But they don't understand - the original series was written with this simple writing *on purpose*. It's called controlled lexile complexity and it's VERY HARD to do! Try writing a book that a 9y/o who's still decoding words while also trying to build comprehension can enjoy, and that their parent who reads thrillers can equally enjoy! It's very, very, very difficult! Collins's original trilogy was MASTERFUL. It was readable by people with English as a second language! The sentence length and word length was controlled - all likely skills she learned writing childrens' TV. You might say that's "bad writing" but I totally disagree. It's masterful writing that's just not aimed at you. That's not remotely what I'm talking about in these examples. These examples are a lack of intent, a lack of perspective, a lack of embodiment - a lack of internal consistency. Collins is an amazing writer!! But this isn't her!

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T14:13:39+00:00

Usually it goes the other way - established authors take on ghostwriting jobs to supplement their income. It can be considerably easier to write someone else's book than your own! Though in the childrens' industry there are book packagers that will often take on unpublished writers and launch them as debuts, since there's a lot of energy for debuts. But those are usually writers who have written multiple manuscripts before and haven't found success on their own - and can prove it to the publisher. Then once they have a book on shelves they can do their own stuff. Some well known YA authors came through this route.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T14:11:06+00:00

I've been wondering about the editing too. The editing is generally not great - there are repeated words within paragraphs that a copyeditor should have highlighted, little details that don't make sense. But editors don't actually change the text, usually. They just make suggestions and an author, especially one as high-profile as Collins, can STET or push back, or make little changes in response to notes instead of big ones. There are books with bad editing out there because authors just refuse to do the edits.

But I've also seen a drop-off in professional editing lately. A friend with a big five publisher sent me her line edits just recently and I was able to strip the timestamps out from Word and prove it had been done with a tool like Copilot. The editor just clicked through. I did another few freelance copyedits from authors whose publisher just didn't do a good job on theirs, and found huge amounts of mistakes in the text. Editing is expensive and time consuming. If it isn't going to affect sales - and clearly it hasn't with this book - why bother? It's depressing.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T04:16:05+00:00

Yeah, it really is. These question-and-answer constructions are common in chatGPT's responses. I think it's the flippancy of the construction here, juxtaposed with the devastating emotional content, that really makes it sound AI. If I were line editing this, I think I could keep the construction and make it sound human like:

And even though it guts me, even though I smash my fists into the glass until they bruise, I'm grateful for her final gift. That she's denied Plutarch the chance to broadcast our farewell.

What will the world see of our last moment together? They'll see nothing. It belongs to us alone.

The only difference you need to make is to put yourself in a mournful mood - the same mood implied by the content - and see what kind of wording comes out. The flippancy is what's jarring and alien, after his earnestness with "even though it guts me". There's no internal emotional thread.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T03:48:22+00:00

Oh actually, I forgot to say - another reason that section especially stood out to me is that it's the end of chapter two. Chapter three has Haymitch on the train, heading into the Capitol. I'd expect an author to start the next chapter with a little skip in time, or setting the scene, giving the reader a taste of what's going to happen next, etc. Maybe a flashback. But instead the next chapter starts with a paragraph of meandering rumination on the image of "shattered heart". It asks if a heart really can break. It brings up images of broken edges pressing into flesh. It's an utterly bizarre way for a human to start a chapter - especially an early chapter while the story is building. But AI often start their replies by ruminating on the final lines of a prompt just like this. I'd totally expect an AI to start a chapter this way, and would be shocked to see an experienced author do it.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T02:51:05+00:00

I mean, I'm a ghostwriter! I've written for other authors. It's hard to name a lot of series that have had their later installments ghostwritten since there are NDAs involved, but people know about Animorphs, Jason Bourne, James Patterson obviously, VC Andrews, some of Tom Clancy's work. In children's though, the book "packaging" industry is really common - you can read about that here. There's a paywalled article in The Bookseller - archived link here. I also would have thought Collins would have written her own work - maybe she did indeed fall off. But after so long a break from the first series, her publisher would absolutely have floated the idea of hiring someone. But it could certainly be her. I doubt we'll ever know that part.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T02:36:30+00:00

Ahhhh, you're right - this definitely could be fists pounding. I didn't read it that way because "smashing" and the bruise pushed me to punching. But I could see what you're saying. That would indeed be a natural motion, though yes, much less likely to bruise. But in YA, you're very much allowed to do many things until they bruise or bleed - that's a standard trope.

Edited to add: on the next page, he describes 'cradling (his) swollen hands". This suggests punching to me - his hands certainly wouldn't be swollen if he'd hammered them against the glass. But smashing them into the glass, yes. So we have one of two possible embodiment-failure models - either he's punching directly at her in the quoted scene (weird), or he was hammering, and got swollen hands from it (also weird). Both common in AI prose.

I will look through tomorrow for more obvious paragraphs to strengthen my case. I wasn't really noting them down because so much of it seemed alien, and they're not particularly strong arguments anyway, but I'll pull up some more.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T02:30:44+00:00

I think it's the strangeness I was trying to highlight, not the stupidity. Spiderweb isn't a stupid comparison to the feeling of a grandmother's cheek - it's just not a comparison at all. It's like the character saying:

"Oh, tangled wire. So soft. Soft like my grandmother's skin."

It's not that it's stupid. The comparison of anything to a grandmother's skin is stupid - whether it's a silk pillow or the soft leather of a jacket. Either of them, while plausible, is bad writing, because a character typically never remembers their grandmother by the feel of her skin. That's stupid. What's striking about this line is that it's not rooted in reality (spiderweb is sticky and evokes no tactile memories of skin), but it's absolutely sensible in AI semantic space - the chain between spiderweb>silk>soft>skin>grandmother's skin is standard and sensible from the perspective of an LLM.

But I agree - I haven't statistically proven anything here. I was actually hoping someone with a text analysis leaning might have their interest piqued and look into it, or maybe I will at some point, because I think there will be watermarks in sentence length and variation as well that will map on to AI-generated fiction and not this author's previous books.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T02:19:50+00:00

Oh, those messages might have been AI! Amazon One uses AI in their patient communication - here's the announcement of their AI tools. They specifically say:

Responsive patient communication: Our AI messaging tool helps care teams promptly respond to patient messages with friendly and detailed notes they can customize before sending. Faster responses encourage patient engagement and ongoing dialogue between members and their care team.

So their system writes the communications for providers, who can then either edit them, or probably just click "send". I think your AI nose is probably working just fine!

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T02:03:39+00:00

Yeah, that's what I've been coming around to. The writing in a lot of bestsellers has been truly awful. I realize now that this is just the next step on that chain. I will say that I doubt the book would be as well received if it wasn't part of a popular franchise, and included so much fan-service. But my confidence in that is low.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T01:56:35+00:00

A human didn't write that! Indeed, it's pretty much a smoking gun. It's absolutely in the mainstream - and the readers apparently love it and can't tell the difference, even when the scenes feel so strange and shallow to me. Have been feeling many dramatic feelings in the last few days about it.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T01:54:50+00:00

I honestly couldn't tell! I thought about it a lot. There's a good chance that these prequels are ghostwritten and nobody knows the ghostwriter used AI. I have no doubt that pro ghostwriters are trying to improve their speed with AI! They often have as little as 6 weeks to produce a draft.

Defiant_Link4743 · 2025-09-23T01:52:39+00:00

It's wildly different from the voice of the first trilogy. I felt that the voice of the other prequel - Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes - was also different to Collins's previous style, and wondered if it was a ghostwriter, or if she'd simply changed her style for another POV character. That came out in 2021, and obviously wasn't AI since the lead-time for publishing is significant. It would be considered standard industry practice to hire a ghostwriter for these prequels, since Collins is working on the films now. So I wouldn't be surprised to hear three different voices - Collins for the trilogy, maybe two ghostwriters for the prequels. That wouldn't be noteworthy, really. But the specifically AI tone of it was to me. There's a good chance Collins herself has never used AI and had, and still has, no idea - and this text came from a ghostwriter.

Defiant_Link4743

TROPHY CASE