A Colorado BookTok creator is speaking out after a stranger allegedly used ChatGPT to turn one of her personal story ideas into a book. What began as a casual discussion about a future writing project quickly spiraled into a heated debate about AI-generated content, authorship, and creative ownership.
The woman in question is Anianne. She is a BookToker who shares a variety of content online, especially book and writing-related clips. With many viral videos under her belt, the one above soon became the most popular of her recent posts. It garnered 212,600 views, 24,800 likes, and more than 700 comments.
The Colorado woman reacted to Kyle Cotton’s initiative. The whole situation began when Anianne and her husband, Steve, discussed an idea for a book. The premise, in simple terms, involves a man going back in time with all his memories and making his future romantic partner fall in love with him with her favorite things. This, according to Anianne, was based on her love story with her husband.
In the clip, one viewer commented, “I would read the [expletive] out of that book.” Kyle then replied to that viewer with a video of his own, in which he explained that he had “started writing” the book himself and even offered it to Anianne. He did so very fast, writing the book in just days. However, he did so using ChatGPT and other AI tools.
Back And Forth
Anianne, while appreciating the “sentiment” behind Kyle offering her the “book” for free, criticized him for using ChatGPT to “writing” it in the first place. She also said that the idea of writing a book is not merely to optimize the process for money, but to actually write the book and put all her experiences in it.
Kyle then said he had sent an email to Anianne but that she hadn’t responded about the book. The Colorado woman, calling the mere act of taking her idea and using AI tools to turn it into a book “disrespectful” and “inappropriate,” said she had actually commented on Kyle’s video, calling him out for using ChatGPT.
“I think you should give it a read and see if you change your mind,” Kyle responded. “I get where you’re coming from, but I think the beauty of AI is that it can put things into words faster than you can.”
In the end, Anianne told Kyle to post the book if he wanted to, but not to act as if he had written it himself.
Reactions
The vast majority of viewers criticized Kyle for openly using AI to write “books.” One said, “We do not want AI slop books.” Another one commented with a sticker: “Shun the AI user.”
Others understood Anianne’s frustrations and reacted accordingly. One wrote, “This is why aspiring authors are so afraid of sharing our ideas.” Another one added, “It’s so much work to write a full manuscript, and it takes determination and heart. Some people want to cut corners.”
Meanwhile, Kyle has continued to double down on his pro-AI book-writing stance, even going so far as to say he could “write” a book a day if he wanted to.
