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.)

The local-device tool doesn’t maintain or share extensive query histories. Falade said he used that approach because the gruesome subject matter of the questions he was asking might raise red flags if they were tracked more widely.
Falade said none of the editors he met with during the book-sale process asked about AI usage. He also said he hadn’t consented to having his manuscript run through AI detection software and found it “very suspicious” that much of the coverage of his situation has focused on the growing capabilities of that software. He said he has retained legal counsel.

In a series of Instagram posts Tuesday, Falade said the claims against him are part of a historical pattern of diminishing the intellectual contributions of people of color. He wrote that in the past such authors were accused of plagiarism, while now “If you’re a Person of Color and you secure a lucrative deal in history, someone, somewhere, will accuse you of using AI.” Meanwhile, he wrote, white authors “brag about using AI all the time.”

Falade told The Wall Street Journal that he was contacted by a reporter who said there were rumors of AI usage, and just hours later learned his agent, Marc Gerald, was pulling support for his book. He declined to comment on the current status of the book deals. Gerald said he is no longer Falade’s literary agent and declined to comment further Tuesday.

A spokeswoman for Macmillan said Friday that the publisher participated in an auction for “Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body” and that “the agent ultimately pulled the book.” She didn’t respond to requests for comment this week on the current status of the book deal with Falade. A spokeswoman for HarperCollins, which like The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp, also didn’t comment on the status of its deal.

In the meantime, Falade said, he is pushing ahead with his next book. “Trust me, when this book is finally released, the bidding war we saw on ‘Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body’ will be child’s play compared to this,” he said.