Powerless & AI (My New Theory)

[00:00:00]I believe Lauren Roberts has almost exclusively used AI to write this series, and I believe I just stumbled on some evidence to support that. First, [music] some critical background information here. Lauren Roberts published this book in 2024. Lauren herself said she started drafting Reckless immediately following the publication of Powerless, the first book in the series, meaning she started writing the sequel in late 2023, early 2024. And I'm focusing on Reckless for a reason here, so bear with me. These were all the AI writing tools at Lauren's disposal while drafting Reckless. Not a short list. The AI landscape was already quite mature, up to and including AI platforms specifically for writing novels. Before reading Reckless, I picked up Dance of Thieves by Mary E.

[00:00:36]Pearson, a book published well before Reckless, and once again, concerningly similar. One thing you need to know, the female protagonist in Dance of Thieves loves oranges. It's memorable enough that I made a video about it. Then I started Reckless, and on page 47, our FMC starts craving oranges. That's strange because in Powerless, she's never expressed liking oranges. [music] The only favorite fruit she mentions is strawberries in a pretty notable conversation between her and the MMC.

[00:00:59]So, why in book two is she suddenly craving oranges and not strawberries?

[00:01:04]Then I happened to get on page 77. A brand new character trait appears twice with no setup, no continuity, and no explanation, and it happens to be kind of a defining characteristic in Dance of Thieves. Now, why is this an AI red flag to me and not just more plagiarism?

[00:01:16]Because this doesn't read like an author intentionally borrowing one memorable trait from another novel. In the AI world, it reads more like a statistical artifact. Large language models, or LLMs, are designed to recognize and reproduce based on the text that they're trained on. If an AI-assisted draft is generated from prompts like write a romanticy scene based on Dance of Thieves, it can reproduce distinctive details like an orange obsession without preserving the original narrative reasons those details existed. So, what we end up with are isolated traits transplanted into a new story where they suddenly appear despite having no foundation in earlier books. That's exactly the kind of continuity break I would expect from heavy AI assistance.

[00:01:50]Now, you may hear all that and think that's a bit of a stretch. It's just oranges. Fair enough, but what about nearly interchangeable characters having extremely similar names across each of these titles. Cal from Red Queen, Kai from Powerless, Effie from Hunger Games, and Elle from Powerless. Lucas from Red Queen, and Lenny from Powerless. Or the similarly named geographic locations.

[00:02:08]Bowl of Bones in Red Queen, and the Bowl in Powerless. Tor's Watch in Dance of Thieves, Door in Powerless. Or Eilea in The Selection, and Ilya in Powerless.

[00:02:18]All Y A dystopian romance fantasy selections by the way. Look, there's a chance that this is just yet another indicator of extreme plagiarism. But I actually think this is a combination of that and the utilization of AI platforms that function by recombining patterns from vast amounts of existing literature through probability-based next token prediction. Essentially remixing recognizable genre conventions into something that appears new. Whether or not you think AI actually belongs in writing or publishing is kind of beside the point. If publishers are going to embrace AI-assisted fiction, readers deserve transparency. Passing AI-assisted work off as entirely human-written, especially when it echoes so many other previously published works, is a question of ethics, originality, and disclosure to the consumer. I'm going to keep reading the series and documenting every similarity I can find between each of these installments and previously published works by Lauren because now more than ever I'm convinced that only one of two truths can be possible. Either Lauren Roberts is a thief or she lied to her readers and this is actually the work of an AI bot. Either possibility is inexcusable to me, so stay tuned for more installments. Happy reading.