Call Me, I’ll Hide The Body was all set to sell for $2m – until suspicions of AI arose, and raised some growing copyright concerns. What should have been a routine acquisition of a novel by a publisher, to then begin its journey to the big screen and selling film rights, hit the buffers last ... The book deal – and potential Hollywood sale – that’s fallen apart over AI
Call Me, I’ll Hide The Body was all set to sell for $2m – until suspicions of AI arose, and raised some growing copyright concerns.
What should have been a routine acquisition of a novel by a publisher, to then begin its journey to the big screen and selling film rights, hit the buffers last week over a question of AI.
Hollywood has a long history of acquiring upcoming novels for its screen work, and early pick-ups over time have included the likes of The Hunger Games, for instance. A new upcoming book called Call Me, I’ll Hide The Body by Jerry Falade had attracted both interest and a handsome offer from a publisher, and an agency was touting it as a screen project too.
According to reports over the past few days, the book was set to land a $2m deal for publishing rights and a sequel, with an eye very firmly on a movie deal not long thereafter.
Yet the deal has apparently fallen apart, over the alleged use of AI in the writing of the book. It seems that there was sufficient feeling AI had been used in the writing of Call Me, I’ll Hide The Body to scupper the entire deal.
See also: 20 Hollywood films that have used AI, and how
This isn’t even book publishers and movie companies taking a moral stand, either. It’s a practical one.
The concern is that if a book or script is written with the assistance of AI, there are now significant doubts that it’ll be protected by the kind of copyright that publishers require. And, as the original Night Of The Living Dead proved in the likes of the DVD era, if you don’t have copyright covered, then you’re in trouble.
It may not quite be as cut and dried as it looks, though.
As per The Guardian, it was an editor who raised the flag over potential AI use, and after conversations with the author, the agency representing the title has now withdrawn it from sale.
Falade has argued that “Three Black authors received major publishing deals this year, and all three later had deals cancelled or disrupted following suspicions about AI. There seems to be a troubling assumption that when a Black writer produces work that attracts significant attention, the work could not possibly be their own. Meanwhile, there are popular white writers who have publicly mentioned using AI for their writing processes and they’re still doing fine.”
He added that he was dropped by his agency “within six hours” of the rumours starting to spread, and argued – not unreasonably – that AI-detection tools are “widely known to produce false positives.”
For whatever reason though, publishers are increasingly unlikely to take the risk.
Subsequently, the film rights too are no longer on the market from said agency, and it’s an interesting era where if you can’t be absolutely clear on no AI use, publishers know it restricts what they can do in the marketplace.
Ultimately, only Falade knows if he used AI tools. If he did, and it’s not proven, then all this can’t come as too much surprise. If he didn’t, it raises just as many questions about how all this can be properly policed and detected.
More on Call Me, I’ll Hide The Body as we hear it. And it may be that an independent press is still willing to take a chance on it. Yet the mere hint of AI use is now loudly earmarked as a significant no-no for writers.
