Fantasy Author Threatens To Sue Reader Over Posting Screenshots Of Her AI Prompts She Accidentally Left In Her Book

Kate Seger found herself embroiled in an incredible amount of drama on Threads after her new fantasy book was called out for having five AI prompts left in the book. She threatened to sue the person who revealed it, leading to her deleting her threads account.

Over the last few weeks, there’s been a massive uptick in instances of authors getting savaged over leaving AI prompts in their books, revealing that they’d been using generative AI to write the text. A few weeks ago, this made headline news as a book got Lena McDonald attention across different media outlets. Now, a new fantasy ARC has a similar story.

Kate Seger claims she doesn’t use generative AI for her actual writing, that she just uses it to help her edit, though she ended up leaving her prompts in her most recent book five times according to a Threads user.

A user posted multiple screenshots, all of which are now taken down, though Fandom Pulse was able to find a couple of them based on searches. In these screenshots of the novel one can clearly see prompts of “Here’s a revised version,” and “I can enhance this scene to make Dartagnon’s marking of Kora with his spiderweb mark…” in the e-reader text, showing the use of AI present.

While these prompts are in there, it does lend credence to Seger saying that she is using AI in this instance to edit, though she clearly needs to use her author eyes to go over the text so she doesn’t put the prompts in the work.

What created more of a drama storm, however, was Seger’s reaction to getting called out about the AI use. While most would agree there’s nothing wrong with running your text through AI for suggestions on edits, her reaction of threatening the users who were putting up the screen shots and showing she used AI was something beyond what a professional author should do.

Seger’s posts started out with her acting a victim, though she also claimed her sales were through the roof from the controversy. If this were the case, however, why would she be so angry with the users who posted the text?

This is where she went off the rails with another post saying, “And since I KNOW you have little spies lurking on my posts… here’s a reminder of copyright law as it currently stands! I think tweaking a few sections with AI doesn’t preclude it from copyright. Sorry.”

She then delved into threats against readers for posting sections of her ARC with the commentary on AI use, which is absurd as commenting on a small section of a work is fair use and isn’t a violation of copyright, but Seger made her threats even more.

“Good. Let her do it. I have an excellent lawyer and I am *not* f***ing around when I say I will pursue legal action. What I did was something a handful of people find ethically reprehensible. What she did is a direct violation of copyright law,” she said.

She doubled down further in another comment, “I hope she doesn’t take them down. I will literally sue her. I am not above paying ofr a lawyer just to be petty. No one should ever underestimate my pettiness.”

Apparently this was the case as her threats of suing caused the user to eventually take down the sections she commentated on, despite them being fair use. Despite this, the user ended up taking down the pictures to appease Seger’s threats.

While the use of AI is not a real problem here, Seger went too far by making threats to readers for talking about her work. If anything, as she said initially, the boost got more eyeballs on her who wouldn’t have read it anyway, something she should be grateful for as it’s very difficult to get books seen in the current environment.

Seger has since deleted her Threads account, making a passive-aggressive post on Instagram about walking away.

Next time, hopefully she’ll run the book through her AI editor again to catch and remove the prompts.

What do you think of fantasy author Kate Seger threatening to sue a reader over posting her AI prompts left in a book? Leave a comment and let us know.

John Robinson is a Space Force Astronaut who crash lands on a planet of the elves. He has to save a beautiful elven princess from peril, all while trying to survive this strange world. Read FREE on Royal Road.

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