The Goodreads Scandal That Predicted Publishing's AI Crisis
There Are No Girls on the Internet
iHeartPodcasts
4.1 • 905 Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2026
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Publishing is having a trust crisis. With AI accusations swirling around authors like Mia Ballard, whose novel Shy Girl was dropped by her publisher despite her denying any AI use, questions about authenticity in publishing have never felt more urgent. But this kind of chaos isn't new. We saw it coming.
We're revisiting one of our wildest deep dives: the Cait Corrain Goodreads scandal. Corrain had a highly anticipated debut novel, Crown of Starlight, coming out in 2024 — until she admitted to using fake Goodreads accounts to review bomb other writers' forthcoming books. Most of her targets were Black or queer authors. Corrain is white.
The story has a lot of twists and turns, including a fabricated conversation with a completely made-up person that Corrain invented to take the fall.
Canadian author Xiran Jay Zhao was the first to bring it to wider attention, noticing that Crown of Starlight was getting glowing reviews from the same accounts trashing other books — some of which weren't even out yet. Zhao also compiled a 31-page Google document of screenshots and receipts: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1__mO1uqIqcmupBAPKwXDzlUbZIwtY6fKf0S1Y0SNz0E/edit?tab=t.0
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. |
| 0:12.0 | I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. |
| 0:17.5 | Did an author use AI to write her novel? |
| 0:21.2 | That's what the Internet says, but the actual story is a lot more complicated. |
| 0:26.0 | Next week, I'm doing a deep dive on the story of Shy Girl, a horror novel by Mia Ballard |
| 0:31.7 | that set the Internet on fire. |
| 0:34.6 | Readers accused Ballard, a black woman author, of using AI to write her novel. She |
| 0:40.1 | denies it, but her publisher dropped the book anyway. It's a story about how fragile publishing |
| 0:46.1 | feels right now and just how quickly a career can unravel. But AI or not, the literary world has |
| 0:52.4 | always had its fair share of chaos. |
| 0:55.1 | So while you wait, we're revisiting one of our wildest deep dives |
| 0:58.7 | about how an author lost her book deal after a Goodreads review bombing scandal. |
| 1:08.5 | There are no girls on the internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. |
| 1:16.6 | I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. |
| 1:22.2 | Okay, so Mike, I desperately need to talk about what's going on with the Goodreads review bombing story. |
| 1:30.7 | Honestly, this is like probably one of the more wild stories I've heard it a very long time. |
| 1:37.5 | And if I'm saying that, somebody who covers weird wild stories on the internet, if I'm saying |
| 1:43.7 | this, you know it's truly wild. We were |
| 1:46.3 | going to do this in this week's news roundup, but honestly, I had so much to say about it that I |
| 1:52.2 | decided it needed to be its own thing. That's because it really involves a lot of stuff that I |
| 1:57.7 | spend a ton of time thinking and talking about. First of all, book communities |
| 2:02.8 | online. I don't know how tapped in you are to like online book communities like book talk or |
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