The game is rigged, the banker cheats. So I broke the rules. How to Win One Million Dollars and $#!T Glitter was a joke, a memoir I wrote with AI to get cast on Survivor (they did not cast me). I ended up winning a 2026 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award for it. I believed every lie Ronald Reagan ever told me. A generation made grift the national pastime, then voted reality TV into the White House. If the American Dream is a lie, then we gotta play by our own rules.
On the first page of my book I make a deal with the reader: I’m gonna “lie, cheat, and steal,” and I mean it. But memory is a fickle friend. And by the end I get a barrage of reviews screaming “I feel scammed.” Yet the critics and the juries? They love me! The Publishers Weekly BookLife Prize scored my debut a 9.5 out of 10. Kirkus called it “an exuberant life story written with humor, panache, and heart.” And (not to spoil the ending) all of them knew I used AI. Plus, all of the stories about my life are true.
That should have settled it. It didn’t. The moment I show an agent or a publisher how the magic trick works, they vanish. Poof. The room goes quiet. Everyone is terrified of an anti-AI public. An honest author is a liability. The work is human. But I wrote it with a machine, and that honesty is what nobody wants to buy.
