Nigerian writer Jerry Falade has become embroiled in a publishing scandal following the collapse of a multi-million-dollar book contract on fears that artificial intelligence may have played a role in writing his first novel.

The writer's crime novel entitled Call Me, I'll Hide the Body created immense interest from publishers, leading to a 14-way bidding war. The manuscript was said to have landed him a multi-million-dollar book deal, valued above $2 million with Minotaur Books of Macmillan US, with talks also ongoing in the UK.

Nevertheless, the deal fell through once Falade's literary agency took the manuscript out of circulation. In a message addressed to publishers, the agency explained that it can no longer trace the development of the manuscript from the original to the final version even though, contrary to expectations, the author assured that AI had nothing to do with the writing or editing of the manuscript.

According to available information, problems emerged when one of the editors doubted the absence of AI in some part of the manuscript. Despite the acceptance of Falade's statement by the agency at the beginning, doubts were expressed later in conversations and led to the withdrawal of its support for the author.

Falade has been firm in refuting any claims that he had used the artificial intelligence program to produce the novel. He claims that the entire storyline, the characters, plot, and even the writing style belong to him and that he has timestamped drafts and handwritten documents attesting to the progression of the book. Falade admits to having used the open-source AI software only for research on particular topics, and never for producing the manuscript.

He has also claimed that these accusations are an attempt at drawing attention to biases in the publishing industry since writers of color are being accused disproportionately of AI use.

This latest case has sparked renewed discussions in the publishing industry about how the role of AI in submissions should be evaluated by publishers. With the increasing availability of generative AI, writers, literary agents, and publishers still face issues of transparency, originality, and no proper ways to verify AI writing.