My work was used to train AI models without my consent. Now I'm being accused of using it.

Writing, and managing a social media presence, is a constant battle, especially in today's climate. This is especially prominent in an era of AI, where people can accuse others of using it without any proof whatsoever.

Today, I received my first AI accusation, and I am here to address it.

As some of you might already know: I uploaded my When They Came series to YouTube in an effort to expand its reach and gain a broader audience for my work. When I logged in to check analytics today, I saw this comment waiting for me:

Accusing someone of using AI to generate an audiobook so brazenly, and without proof of the fact, is alarming at best. Some might even consider it libel, but that isn't the point of this post. The point of this post is to highlight an important fact of my process:

I have not, nor ever will, use AI to write my books.

In March 2025, The Atlantic posted an article titled "Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI." This article came with a tool that allows users to see whose works were used to train Meta's AI models on fiction. Simply typing in my name in the tool reveals a staggering truth: that 41 of my titles were used to help train Meta's AI models.

These aren't just recent works, either. If you scroll down to the bottom of this post, you will also see that they took titles I wrote in my teens, including the novel Inner Demons, which would eventually be rewritten in my late twenties into The Monsters Within.

This is an important thing to understand, because while Inner Demons was never officially released on the more prominent eBook outlets, it was originally uploaded to Smashwords before 2010. Which means that the scraping went back to my teenage years. (For reference: I am 34 as of now. I recall writing Inner Demons and serializing it before putting it on Smashwords when I was 16.)

With this background out of the way, I would like to address the When They Came trilogy as a whole.

I published When They Came on Amazon in 2017.

Roughly three years later, I would agree to an ACX contract with Krys Janae to produce the audiobook versions of these novels. I happened to keep the email from ACX (Audible Creation Exchange, where I originally partnered with Krys to produce these books) wherein she confirmed the completion of book 2 in February 2020.

Since she completed the recordings and production of When They Came, Krys has gone on to record 150+ audiobooks across the landscape. She was even part of the audiobook cast of Playground by Richard Powers, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Needless to say, I shouldn't have to explain myself. I don't even need to write a post about it. Baseless accusations are just that: baseless. But when it comes to accusing people I work with of using AI when they most obviously have not (and when there is proof of the recording process having been done that goes six years back), I will not stand for that. Not in the slightest.

I believe in real artists, real editors, real narrators, and real writers. You will always see me put money in their direction, just as you will always see me utilizing their services.