ESSAY: On Hachette's Internal Use of AI

The Call is Coming from Inside the House

On March 19^th Hachette made headlines for terminating a book contract with author Mia Ballard over her alleged use of AI in her novel Shy Girl; meanwhile, Hachette has talked with the AI editing software company Alighieria, which offers full-scope AI editorial correction tools. Hachette’s statement that it is “committed to protecting original creative expression and storytelling”¹ sounds a little less robust in view of these talks with Alighieria. Ballard herself claims that her novel was only “edited” using AI, so where exactly is the line to be drawn? Alighieria co-founder Antonio J. Rodríguez acknowledged that his company has been in communication with Hachette, although he said he “can’t share much about the specifics of what we’ve been talking about together.” Representatives for Hachette did not respond to my request for comment, but an employee of Little, Brown, an imprint of Hachette, told me, “We are happy to learn about AI tools that help production editors with repetitive tasks.”

While Hachette’s internal use of AI may seem particularly ironic in light of their statements and actions around Shy Girl, they are certainly not alone in their integration of AI tools. Recent contracts for Knopf authors include the clause, “The Author acknowledges and agrees that Publisher may use the Work in connection with Publisher-controlled AI-powered tools and technologies utilized in the normal course of Publisher’s operations (including but not limited to indexing, generating search terms and generating book club questions).” Also in the news recently was the deal that HarperCollins struck with AI-powered animation studio Toonstar to coproduce a YouTube series based on HarperCollins titles², and The Bookseller reported that Gordon Wise, agent at Curtis Brown, has shared his concerns that some editors are allegedly using ChatGPT to assess manuscripts. Wise told Heloise Wood that rather than “editors personally considering material,” the submissions are “allegedly being put through OpenAI to create summaries and to create comparisons and overviews.” He shared that “disturbingly, conversations in the course of [London Book Fair] have indicated that this seems to have become a widely adopted practice.”³

Alighieria is an artificial intelligence driven “editorial intelligence platform” developed by Spanish journalist and novelist Antonio J. Rodríguez. Alighieria is advertised as offering full-scope editorial correction (orthotypography, grammar, style, syntax, and data verification), optimized editorial translation, automatic creation of onomastic and thematic indexes (these are those individualized author style guides that writers are so fond of posting), generation of communication materials (press releases, synopses, promotional texts) and more.

When I asked Rodríguez if his software was meant to replace human copyeditors and factcheckers, he rattled off what sounded like a list of prescription drug warnings: “Alighieria advises the use of this software in a responsible and ethical manner along with the irreplaceable value of human judgment.” When I asked him why Hachette, or any publishing house, would pay to use Alighieria on top of the continued cost of human copyeditors, factcheckers, and translators, he said that the software would allow the humans to work faster, offering a “significant reduction in production time.” Rodríguez is fond of speaking in terms of “bottlenecks.” He mentioned the word five times during my interview with him, but when I pressed him about the specifics of “solving bottlenecks” or “helping editors with bottlenecks,” he seemed unable to provide examples aside from a “vast reduction in production time.” Do we really need books to be produced faster? I asked him, citing the recent Publisher’s Weekly numbers that put the overall production of books in 2025 at over 4 million⁴. No, Rodríguez admitted, we don’t necessarily need vastly more books pumped quickly out into the world, but he said human copyeditors, translators, and factcheckers are grossly underpaid and many of them are paid per book so the acceleration in production through the use of Alighieria will allow them to work on multiple books at once and therefore scrape together a slightly higher paycheck. In other words, I echoed back to Rodríguez, AI editing software is the ultimate scab, working faster and cheaper and thereby keeping the pay rate and labor conditions low; instead of demanding a living wage, we just speed up the assembly line. Rodríguez said he wasn’t sure about this analogy, but what he was sure of was that the type of work that his software does is not the “beautiful part of editing or writing a book.” I stopped him and asked, to be sure that I had heard him correctly, if he saw no beauty at all in translation, fact-checking, and copyediting. No, he said, “for me this is something more or less boring […] it is not something that I enjoy about the process of writing.”

When Rodríguez says “for me,” he is speaking as a novelist. Drawing from his experiences publishing Candidato (Literatura Random House, 2019), he says, “I have discussed the novel with my editor, we have talked a lot about which are the scenes that are important, which are the dialogs that are useful, which are the parts which are the most powerful parts, and we have all these intellectual conversations, which for me is the most exciting thing.” Everything that comes after that, he says, is boring, “I’m not a linguist, right? I’m a writer, but I’m not interested in dealing with language in a scientific way.”

My personal experience of working with human translators, factcheckers, and copyeditors on my own novels has felt very different; it has proven to be a fascinating, educative, and very rewarding process, perhaps because I do care about language on something of a scientific level, no choice in any single one of my sentences is ever arbitrary. For my first two novels (which were published with Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill before it was bought by Hachette), I worked with factchecker and copyeditor Jude Grant. Grant was incredible, working slowly and deliberately beside me through the text to weed out errors and lift my prose to a whole new level. I was stunned at both Grant’s expertise and with the final product; my novels were so much better after she worked with me. I reached out to Grant for comment about Hachette’s integration of AI editorial tools, and she said that she had stopped working for Algonquin Books after it was bought by Hachette and that she has generally “backed off American literary fiction in recent years.” When I asked her why, her answer reminded me of Rodríguez’s dismissal of fact-checking and copyediting. “My experience,” Grant said, “has been that in recent years a newer, younger generation of authors are not only less receptive to edits of any kind to their precious words, but they are also not interested in engaging in the conversation. To be fair, some of their words ARE precious, just not all of them. And while I don’t know precisely what is going on in-house, my sense is that editors are overworked and very stressed and less available to helpfully intervene in cases where the authors’ insistence on keeping their work as is is really affecting the quality of the final book. And I’m not trying to blame the editors. Honestly, I think most companies in America now are pretty unhappy places to work. And last, people (editors, authors, others) have really lost their manners since Covid.” She has moved over to working for university presses where the authors “are still very interested in the conversations, and the working relationships among authors, in-house editors, and freelancers are congenial and purposeful, not adversarial and frustrating.”

What does it mean for readers and writers that publishers are embracing AI? On the one hand, if the use of AI were truly limited to, as Rodríguez says, “telling you to change this comma here or capitalize that letter there,” we might be tempted to see it as innocuous. However, the truth is much darker. The use of AI, even for small rote tasks, results in disastrous climate impacts. AI uses “staggering amount of electricity, which leads to increased carbon dioxide emissions and pressures on the electric grid” as well as straining “municipal water supplies and disrupt[ing] local ecosystems.”⁵ Rodríguez’s response to my questions about the environmental impact of Alighieria was that “your impact to the environment as a publisher will be less if you are vegan.” It seems unlikely to me that the CEOs of the world’s leading publishing conglomerates will all become vegan; it also seems unlikely to me that they will license the use of full-scope translation and editorial software and continue to simultaneously employ human translators and editors in a significant way. What this means for readers and writers is that we must pay attention; no longer can we passively assume that a book is a book is a book. Going forward, some books will be edited by AI, and some books will be edited by humans. As a reader, I will choose the human books, and as a writer, I will not publish with houses that replace human editors with AI editorial tools.

I found the process of working with my human copyeditor, Jude Grant, on my novels, Sugar Run and Perpetual West, to be so interesting, congenial, and purposeful that I wanted to share the process with the world, and so, in March 2022, I published an interview with her on The Nervous Breakdown. The interview is no longer available online, so I am reissuing it here to give a bit of insight into the beautiful, intellectual act of working with a human copyeditor. The interview occurred before the widespread use of AI. As I look back on it now, I think of the words of Atria editor Sean Delone, who says, “Human creativity is not an efficiency problem that can be optimized. Treating writers’—and by extension editors’—work as a problem AI or any technology can solve misunderstands the qualitative advantages that book publishers, movie studios, and musical artists have proven they have over tech giants. […] The biggest threat to book publishing and other creative industries and indeed humanity itself, is that consumers will dumb themselves down with AI to the point they can no longer discern or be bothered.”⁶

It is crucial that we discern. It is imperative that we continue to be bothered.

Interview with Jude Grant (conducted in March 2022)

Mesha Maren: Before working with you on my first novel, Sugar Run, I had no real sense of what copyediting a work of fiction entailed. I was surprised and very delighted to learn that you would point out more than just my horrific misuse of commas. In that novel, I remember specifically being pleased at how well you kept track of physical descriptions of my characters. At one point in the book I described a woman’s breasts as “full” and at another point “perky” and you asked me if I felt that these descriptions were compatible. I was delighted and shocked at that level of specificity and it made me wonder about how you go about keeping track of details about fictional characters that even the author has not been able to manage?

Jude Grant: Note-taking, note-taking, note-taking. One of my weaknesses as a reader, especially when reading for pleasure, is that a character’s physical attributes just aren’t that interesting to me. Black hair? Blond hair? Don’t really care. (If pressed, I’ll champion “perky” over “full” breasts, but that is strictly personal preference and is an opinion without literary merit.) So my style sheets tend to be detailed, especially when it comes to characters’ physical traits, not because I think the proofreader will necessarily benefit from having that information but because those are the kind of details that are less likely to stick in my head. What characters say (content and language used) and how they behave are a different matter—all that deeply resonates and imprints on me. If characters were nothing but talking heads, I’d be happy (there are reasons I’m not a writer).

MM: What are the bounds of a copyeditor’s job, especially in terms of fiction. In both of my novels you have helped me to solve discrepancies in everything from when a certain slot machine came into existence to the driving time between coastal Sinaloa and Chihuahua City. Are there areas of a fictional manuscript that you don’t have to worry about, where you can say “it’s fiction so it’s okay”?

JG: I try to be a stickler about that stuff. If an author wants to peg a fictional event to April 4, 1990—a Wednesday, according to the calendar—then when they write three pages later, “Four days after such-and-such event . . . ,” I’d like that fourth day to be a Sunday, not a Tuesday. But if an author feels strongly about attaching a wrong day to their date, I won’t press it as long as the overall timeline ultimately holds together. But I’m not going to allow anachronisms, such as a character viewing a 2002 movie in 1994, and it’s also unlikely an author would want to claim literary license there.

Google Maps is my go-to for your books, but it’s not foolproof. It will gauge distance and it will let me know if point A is east or west of point B, but I’m not looking closely at topography and road conditions. If I’m not certain about details like driving time, as with your book, I’ll bounce it back to you, the author and the expert (more on my mapping issues below).

MM: What is your overall process like with a fictional manuscript? Do you go through the pages marking everything from commas to place names to physical descriptions all at once or do you do a read through for grammar followed by a read through for facts, etc.?

JG: First comes the very dull formatting (for example, getting rid of double spaces between sentences, a particular source of irritation) and coding design elements. But doing this initial page-by-page scroll-through of the manuscript also lets me glimpse excerpts of the writing, which gives me a sense of an author’s style (like your “horrific” commas, which I was not going to bring up) and voice. When editing, I tend to go paragraph by paragraph, doing everything at once—grammar, style, place-names, character attributes, timeline, timeline, timeline. I’ll flag what I think are inconsistencies and review them later, after I’ve given the entire MS an initial copyedit—sometimes they’re intentional, sometimes not. Finally, because it’s easy to get distracted by the markups, I’ll read through the book one more time with the edits hidden so I can catch things I might have missed the first time and fix any errors I might have accidentally introduced (yeah, that sometimes happens—which is why I’m always grateful for a thorough author review).

MM: I’m assuming that you copyedit nonfiction as well as fiction. Can you talk about any differences there?

JG: I’m fortunate to work on a variety of texts—fiction, trade nonfiction, academic monographs, college textbooks, cookbooks. The process is essentially the same, though with less literary license allowed: April 4, 1990, will be a Wednesday, and there will be no horrific commas. Rather than maintaining a reasonable, consistent timeline, I’m looking for a reasonable, consistent argument, whether or not I agree with it, or, in the case of recipes, clear organization and instructions and no missing ingredients.

MM: Has fiction always been copyedited with an eye towards facts or has this changed over the years? I remember having a conversation with you about a series of names (counties, towns, roads) that I had made up and you flagged them because they either a) did not really exist or b) did exist but not in the state or region where I claimed them to be. You said you wanted to talk with me about it because readers might look them up and become confused. Has the internet and readers’ ability to look things up changed the copyediting of fiction?

JG: Hmm, not sure. As someone who’s been doing this “over the years,” I think I’ve always been mindful of the facts of fiction. Place-names are something I always look up because their spellings can be so arbitrary and I want to make sure we have them right. Made-up place-names are perfectly fine, but I want to guard against a made-up Boston, Massachusetts, being situated, say, in the Berkshires. Possibly I obsess about this stuff because when it comes to direction sense, my own brain is wired completely and humiliatingly wrong. I am simply not well grounded in space. Last spring I moved, and the side streets in my neighborhood are often abruptly cut off and divert cars to other side streets in an effort to control traffic and speed. So to get to my house from almost any direction, you kind of have to spiral your way in—intuitive for some people; easily learned for others. But a nightmare for me. I still GPS my way home from the grocery store. And adding insult to injury, my garage is in an alley that requires a different route for spiraling in. For months, I could access the garage only on foot because it has no address I can plug into a GPS. Mortifying. So yeah, I guess I’m hypervigilant about knowing where places are in someone’s manuscript because in my head they are rarely where I think they are.

On April 23rd Antonio J. Rodríguez sent us a correction statement that reads:

“To whom it may concern, Following the publication of the essay “On Hachette’s Internal Use of AI” by Mesha Maren on Zona Motel (Substack, April 15, 2026), I want to clarify on behalf of Alighieria Systems that we are not working with Hachette Livre, nor have we ever had a commercial relationship with them.”

In response to this statement, the following sentences have been edited:

“Hachette has negotiated with the AI editing software company Alighieria” has been corrected to read “Hachette has talked with the AI editing software company Alighieria” and “in view of these negotiations with Alighieria” has been corrected to read “in view of these talks with Alighieria.” These changes have been made in order to better reflect the quote from Antonio J. Rodríguez from an email sent on April 3rd and included in the article above, “As for Hachette — I can't share much about the specifics of what we've been talking about together.”

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1. https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/anthropic-project-glasswing-claude-mythos-preview/

2. https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/toonstar-harpercollins-animated-series-friendship-list-1236702618/

3. https://www.thebookseller.com/news/some-editors-uploading-confidential-manuscripts-to-chatgpt-to-read-quickly-agent-claims

4. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/99943-book-output-topped-4-million-in-2025.html

5. https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117

6. Don’t Automate Yourself Out of a Job, or Book Publishing in the Age of AI