The Nigerian author accused of using artificial intelligence to craft the debut novel that landed him a multimillion-dollar book deal said he was innocent and that the claims against him were racially motivated.
“Definitely innocent!!!” Jerry Falade, a graduate student at Southern Methodist University, said in an Instagram story early Tuesday. “They CAN’T and WON’T stop this Black boy’s light from shining!!” he wrote in another.
Fourteen publishers had bid on the U.S. rights for Falade’s crime novel, “Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body,” and he ultimately signed a two-book deal with Macmillan’s Minotaur Books imprint worth more than $2 million. HarperCollins Publishers landed the U.K. rights.
Soon after the deals closed, Falade’s agent at Europa Content notified the publishers in a letter that he could no longer support the book after concerns were raised about the author’s possible AI use.
In an interview, Falade said he only used AI for research, “and not for writing the book itself.” He relied on a tool that let him run an open-source AI model on his own device, to query details like what chemical someone might use to dissolve a human body or to check the more American-ized version of the word “wardrobe,” he said. (Falade completed his undergraduate degree in Nigeria.)
