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AI Detection and the Sin of Slander

AI Detection and the Sin of Slander

Last updated on: July 31, 2026 at 9:50 pm by Jennifer Fitz

AI Detection and the Sin of Slander 2026-07-31T21:50:22-05:00 Jennifer Fitz

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In today’s publishing news, author Jerry Falade had a massive ($2 million massive) publishing deal canceled over accusations he used AI in writing his novel. The author is denying it, and offered evidence he wrote the work himself.

The whole story is a cautionary tale about the sins of rash judgment and *calumny—*what we commonly call slander. Unfortunately, the situation isn’t a simple one to resolve.

AI is a Plagiarism Machine

The stakes are high in the publishing world because of how AI works. AI writing tools plagiarize the source materials used to train the machine, so publishers can’t claim a clear copyright to an AI-generated work.

In a novel, the deeper question of the centrality of human authorship is also at play. But even in something as bland as a set of technical instructions, there’s a serious business question at hand: Why would a publisher invest enormous resources into producing and marketing a book that they can’t acquire exclusive rights for?

(Don’t go all anti-capitalism on me here. People need honest work to make a living. You can like a publisher’s business practices or not, but assuming just wages and all that, commercial viability is what keeps families fed.)

Furthermore, because of the way copyright law works, the publisher and author can be held liable for AI-generated copyright law violations even if they didn’t realize they were copying someone else’s work. So if you use AI to help “flesh out” an idea or edit your draft, you can find yourself unknowingly liable for a copyright violation if the machine generates a suggested text that happens to be someone else’s work.

How strict are publishers about this? When I was writing Classroom Management for Catechists, the revised draft I submitted included a properly attributed quote from an expert author who studied learning styles, a topic my editor wanted the book to cover. I included the quote exactly as I’d learned to do in academia to avoid plagiarism. My editor made me rewrite!

=> As I was not able, given the tight turnaround time, to get explicit permission from the copyright owner to use that quote, I had to paraphrase the author’s underlying idea — with full attribution of course — to avoid any potential copyright liability whatsoever. It was not just a matter of giving the original author credit (check, legal there), but also of whether I had explicit permission to use even a sentence or two of his exact wording.

This is serious business.

Is AI Detection a Slander-Machine?

The difficulty, though, is that AI detection software is not fully accurate. For several years now we’ve heard cases of students falsely accused of writing with AI. That the software says a student’s writing is AI is just a machine-generated version of the old “you aren’t smart enough to have written this.”

It is of course impossible for outsiders to know whether, in any given case, the student is innocent.

Before generative-AI, it was a little easier to detect plagiarism.

As a teacher I once received a book report didn’t sound like 6th grade work — and specifically, there was an abrupt shift from normal student writing to very grown-up sounding literary-speak. I put the questionable section into a search engine, and sure enough it was a direct quote from an online book review. The principal and I followed-up accordingly.

With generative-AI, the plagiarized output can be much harder to pin down. We who are reading the story in the news cannot know whether Jerry Falade is in fact innocent of the charges that have cost him a massive publishing contract.

“Sounds like AI” is no more proof of guilt than “Sounds too grown-up for a 6th grader.” Unless the program purporting to detect AI-generated writing can pin down the source of the plagiarized material (not impossible, theoretically), it’s just working on vibes.

What does The Catechism have to say?

Let’s look at the section of The Catechism of the Catholic Church on “Offenses Against the Truth”, CCC 2475 – 2487. Paragraph 2477 sums up what is at play in AI detection programs. Here I’ve quoted verbatim, but have added boldface and paragraph breaks to make it easier to follow:

2477 Respect for the reputation of persons forbids every attitude and word likely to cause them unjust injury.277

He becomes guilty:

– of rash judgment who, even tacitly, assumes as true, without sufficient foundation, the moral fault of a neighbor;

– of detraction who, without objectively valid reason, discloses another’s faults and failings to persons who did not know them;278

– of calumny who, by remarks contrary to the truth, harms the reputation of others and gives occasion for false judgments concerning them.

These are serious sins, and I encourage you to read the whole chapter.

Conclusion: It’s not justice if it requires injustice.

I wish there were an easy solution here. Justice requires that copyright be protected. Authors who use generative AI are randomly spraying bullets into a crowd. Maybe the machine doesn’t plagiarize, but since that is what it is designed to do, it’s unreasonable to imagine that you somehow won’t hit anyone.

Justice demands that the original author’s rights be respected, and that plagiarizing authors likewise be prevented from harming publishers and others who were relying on those authors’ integrity.

AI-detection software, however, as it stands right now, is an unjust tool when used in isolation. It’s a hunch. A sneaking suspicion. Looks guilty. Without corroborating evidence, assuming the tool is accurate is to commit an injustice against the accused, destroying a reputation and a livelihood in the process.

This, too, is gravely evil.

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About Jennifer Fitz

Jennifer Fitz is solely responsible for every ridiculous thing she writes here or elsewhere. Currently pretty hard to pin down, but she's having a lovely time doing real things in real life, plus also working on a novel that is far too weird to be AI. You can read more about the author here.

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