As author and critic James Bradley said back in 2024, “AI isn’t about unleashing our imaginations, it’s about outsourcing them”. It began earlier in the year with Hachette pulling a debut novel for alleged AI use, which was apparently detected by … AI. This is the ecosystem that makes the book world work. Trust that when you read a book, you are truly stepping into the author’s world, not a predictive text version of it. Evie Gaughan, writing under the name Evie Woods, is author of The Lost Bookshop.