Bauer Media Halts Writer Commissions, Publishes AI-Written Short Stories

Bauer Media, one of the UK's largest publishers of women's and entertainment magazines, has paused commissions for freelance writers of short stories published in the Fiction Feast supplement to "Take a Break" magazine. In the July issue, nine stories were credited collectively to the "Fiction Feast Team," and an independent test found they were generated entirely by artificial intelligence.

Silence before the reveal

The first message sent to Fiction Feast's regular writers on June 12 made no mention of artificial intelligence. The publisher said only that it was pausing new commissions, citing a backlog of already-submitted stories. For many writers who had contributed for years, it sounded like a standard, temporary pause in commissioning.

Only in the July 1 message did Bauer admit outright that the halt in commissioning was tied to the introduction of AI tools for producing short stories. The company stressed that the experiment was limited to the fiction desk at Fiction Feast and did not extend to journalistic content published in the group's other titles.

Nine stories, no byline

As a result, alongside 20 stories credited to 13 named authors, the July issue featured nine stories collectively credited to the "Fiction Feast Team," with no individual writer named. Press Gazette journalists ran these texts through Pangram, a tool that detects machine-generated content, and got an unambiguous result: all nine stories were rated as 100 percent AI-written.

AI was used to write first drafts of some, though not all, of these stories, but the ideas, the editing and every decision about what goes in the magazine still belong to our editorial team. - Bauer Media spokesperson

Writers react

Among the authors who had written for Fiction Feast for years, reactions range from understanding to sharp opposition. Some point out that the language models used to generate such texts were trained on huge datasets of previously published fiction, likely including their own stories, without any consent or payment.

AI doesn't create literary fiction, and what it produces comes from the work of real writers, used without their consent. - Patsy Collins, Fiction Feast author

Another longtime contributor, Nicola Martin, predicts the publisher's decision will "come back to bite them," given the quality of the generated stories, which in her view fall short of professional writers' work. Gabrielle Mullarkey said she was disappointed but understood the "staffing pressure" Bauer is currently facing.

Pressure on publishers

The introduction of AI at Fiction Feast is not an isolated move. Bauer is currently undergoing a broad digital restructuring that includes job cuts across several titles in the UK and Germany. The publisher directly links these cuts to falling traffic from Google, driven by the growing use of AI-generated search summaries that reduce the number of clicks reaching publishers' sites.

For the entertainment fiction segment, where stories are short, formulaic by genre and published in large volumes, the cost of commissioning freelance writers is relatively easy to replace with machine generation. This type of creative work, alongside simple editorial copy, is considered by the publishing industry to be among the most exposed to automation.

Bauer's case adds to a series of similar incidents reported in recent months, in which newspaper and magazine publishers turned to AI to produce content without full transparency toward readers and writers. Unlike previously disclosed cases where AI-written texts were published under the byline of a real, laid-off journalist, Bauer opted for a collective, anonymous editorial credit, which some commentators read as an attempt to avoid direct accountability for the quality and origin of the text.

For Polish writers and translators working with women's and entertainment magazines, the case has practical relevance. Domestic publishers of similarly positioned titles are watching Western experiments with AI fiction as a possible model to follow, particularly in the cheap newsstand press segment, where cost pressure and falling circulation have squeezed fee budgets for years.

Bauer maintains that, for now, the test is limited solely to the Fiction Feast supplement and does not extend to the group's other titles or to journalistic material. The publisher has not said when, or whether, it will return to fully commissioning freelance writers, nor has the editorial team laid out a plan to tell readers which specific stories were produced with AI involvement beyond the general team byline.

Sources: Press Gazette (pressgazette.co.uk)