Reading is now restless as AI-generated stories challenge the traditional bond between author and reader. The advent of AI may damage the relationship between a reader and a work of literature, making it harder to track and understand the narrative. The story 'The Serpent in the Grove' by Jamir Nazir, a regional winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, is a prime example of this. The story exhibits common AI-writing 'tells' such as em dashes and the word 'hums' in the first sentence. While the preoccupation with who the author might be distracts from the real casualty of AI-written fiction: the reader. The metaphors in the story are nonsensical, and the narrative is hard to track. The conversation around the story's style made me think about the tight relationship between a reader and a work of literature. Reading is a solitary activity, not a lonely one. I was a shy kid who loved books in part because they felt like a form of friendship extended to me by the author. The phrase 'Dear reader' common to fiction for centuries suggests a relationship between author and reader that is intimate, warm, even affectionate. The literary critic Wayne Booth writes that 'all stories, in short, claim to offer something to us that will add to our lives, and they are thus like the would-be friends we meet in real life.' Of course, not every author is pleasant company. And sometimes the connection between writer and reader becomes pathologically intense. Interest in the author's life can curdle into obsession, as in Henry James's 'The Aspern Papers.' But in its milder versions, the bond with an author leads from admiration of the author's style to curiosity about their life. Biographies of authors consistently outsell other forms of literary criticism. When I say that I teach literature, one of the most common reactions people have is to ask me whether Shakespeare really wrote his plays. Yes, mostly, but the point is that we imagine someone, an author, a proper name, at the other end of the line. Claude has a proper name, and the line is always open. As the technology improves, style will be harder to use—it has already become harder to use—as a clue to the truth about authorship. Services are available that humanize AI tics. The consistency of a literary style over time may also be replicable. If AI can be used to write a story, an AI agent could presumably be cloistered with only the text that it