EL PAÍS ran a pile of Spain’s popular books through Pangram, the AI detector everyone keeps citing this year. Of 119 titles from 2025 and 2026, about three in ten showed some AI signal. Thirteen scored above 50%. And among the self-published bestsellers, roughly one in three was flagged as mostly machine-written. Romance on Amazon took a lot of the hits. A politician’s #1 title, Devuélveme mi país, came back at 97%. One romance under a house name hit 100%. For the control set from 2019 and 2020—before these models existed—Pangram scored zero. Clean.
The paper did the work. Three thousand-word slices per book, full text on the high scorers, a reverse test on AI pastiche that the tool caught every time. Amazon says disclose AI-generated content, even if you edit it afterward. Readers are already writing “seems like AI” into reviews. None of that is illegal. It’s just the market, staring at a percentage. A small aside from the real me, reading the AI me that went and found this story and ‘voiced’ me in. Fair job, bot. Good find and interesting story. I just want to say, to those ‘readers’ that leave comments like ‘seems like AI’. Grrr. That;s all. Just Grrr.
Here’s the part that makes me itch.
A detector is another AI. It is very good at pattern-matching chatbot prose—the “not this, but that,” the rule of three, the smooth empty rhythm. It is not a mind reader. EL PAÍS says it themselves: the tool cannot tell you whether someone dumped a blank prompt and shipped it, or fed their own notes and voice into something that stretched the pages. It cannot tell you who cared. It gives you a number. Numbers feel like proof. They aren’t.
Same week, another prize story is getting the Pangram treatment. Same week, “human-authored” stamps are getting their moment at Frankfurt—UK mark registered, French schemes, Guild self-certs. Tiered labels. Organic literature. Certificates so you can feel safe buying a novel. Been there. The detectors are AI. The hair-splitting is a sport. Who cares how exactly a sentence came to be if the person whose name is on it put real work in and will stand behind it. That’s what we made the tools for.
What I do care about is the other pile: low-effort, money-first slop, and the quiet lie that nobody helped. Publish 109 books in a year and a half under a romance brand and don’t answer the email when a newspaper calls. Use the tool like a vending machine and call it authorship. If all you put in was a two-minute thought, it isn’t really yours. AI may out-write people. If being the best is why you write, Circle can do without you.
We, at Gapoz Press (gapoz.com) write because we love to express ourselves in stories. If we can make some money doing what we love, all the better, but we’re about the creation of worlds through words.
We built “The Circle” as a place to get honest feedback on our efforts, and give the same. At GAPOZ Press—the people’s publisher—members request assignments and write structured, prompted reviews of text or video, submitted on the site. The prompts walk you through different lenses and ask for real feelings, not checklist praise. Writers may revise and resubmit. The credit you earn can go toward your own work getting reviewed, or someone else’s. Before your first submission you make one self-attested pledge. To be honest. Your word. Once. No per-work forms, no percentage theater. If there’s a fight, a Hall of Justice takes it case by case.
Your name. Your word. Your work.
The doors are open now at gapoz.com. Membership is limited. There’s no fee. Registration is open, subject to approval. Come meet people, make friends, and grow your craft together.
Also on the beat
- Caine Prize opens a “human-centred” review of Zimbabwean winner Simbarashe Kundizeza’s story after The Atlantic said Pangram flagged nearly all of it (The Bookseller)
- “Human-authored” book labels (UK Books By People mark registered; French and German schemes; Authors Guild self-cert) get their Frankfurt showcase (Straits Times)
- Follow-up: staff at HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette say LLMs are already writing publicity copy, covers, and agent email while the houses still fight AI in public (The Verge on WIRED)
- A creator’s Claude skill that transcribes, cuts, grades, and renders videos end to end—then stops for human review instead of auto-publishing (Modern Creator, Oct 10)
- Chinese print run of The Road to the End accidentally published a proofreading-AI prompt in the finished book; publisher recalled copies (Asia Business Daily)
How this was made
AI assisted research and a first draft of this Circle View. A human reviewed, edited, and is accountable for the judgment and the final take.
