The AI of Judith A. Barrett

Boy, oh boy, it’s my favourite time of year again, when I downloaded interesting books, but it turned out they were created using AI. So, who’s the AI writer this time?

Judith A. Barrett, the culprit, “The Librarian”.

Now, it didn’t take me long to figure out something was amiss, but I try not to compare poor writing to AI since writing is a skill and what I consider poor might be higher than others, but what tipped me off was in chapter two when I read this.

The Librarian – I answered the plumber’s knock and invited him in. He was tall and muscular and wore his wire-rimmed glasses on top of his head. His gray hair was thick and curly, and his mustache was red with gray streaks.

“Maggie, your mother is sure proud of you. Whenever I come to fix her cantankerous dishwasher or whatever’s broken, she points at your high school picture with your green eyes and blond curls. Did you know your real name’s No-Sensatall?” I loved his laugh. My favourite guffaw.”

That just felt so... unnatural that I had to pause and look to see if the author uses AI and it turns out, she does.

A quick Twitter search will show that she follows both Midjourney and Authors AI.

Not to mention her own image in the about the author section of her webpage was created using AI (most likely by Midjourney) So yeah, it’s pretty safe to assume Judith uses AI to write stories.

Before I delete this book from my records, I might as well have some fun with it.

The main character has a mother who appears throughout the story, the mother’s name is Isolde...that doesn’t get revealed until you’re 82% of the way through the story. Even after this revolution, the story continues to still not call Isolde by her name and instead as just "Mother". In fact, I have now referred to the mother character as Isolde MORE TIMES THAN THE BOOK!

We also got weird sentences such as this - “I like your attitude, girl. You just stick with me. We’ll tell ’em I got the big boxes and you got the little ones.” I loved her booming laugh. - The Librarian, Judith. A Barrett

Where’s the booming laugh?

Also, the story just sounds very AI, there’s no personality, and it’s all very robotic sounding and flat. The words don’t flow and there are weird sentences. You can feel there’s no love put into this story. Again, I try not to go with the argument, that poor writing means it was created by AI because even with poor writing you can feel the soul in a story. You can hear the author's voice, this was done by AI and it’s very easy to see if you just read the first two chapters.