The New York Times has cut ties with a freelance journalist after discovering he used artificial intelligence to help write a book review that echoed elements of a review of the same book in the Guardian.

It came after a New York Times reader flagged similarities between the paper’s January review of Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, written by author and journalist Alex Preston, and an August review of the same book written by Christobel Kent in the Guardian.

The New York Times launched an investigation, during which Preston admitted that he had used AI to assist writing the review and did not spot the sections that were pulled from the Guardian before submitting it. In a statement to the Guardian on Tuesday, Preston said that he was “hugely embarrassed” and had “made a serious mistake”.

The New York Times alerted the Guardian to the overlap in an email sent on Monday, and added an editor’s note to the review acknowledging the use of AI and linking to the Guardian piece. “A reader recently alerted the Times that this review included language and details similar to those in a review of the same book published in the Guardian,” reads the editor’s note. “We spoke to the author of this piece, a freelancer reviewer, who told us he used an AI tool that incorporated material from the Guardian review into his draft, which he failed to identify and remove. His reliance on AI and his use of unattributed work by another writer are a clear violation of the Times’s standards.”

Language that appears to be lifted from the Guardian review includes descriptions of characters – “lazy Machiavellian Stefano” appears as “lazy, Machiavellian Stefano” in the New York Times version – and the concluding assessment of the novel: the Guardian review states that the book is “most significantly a song of love to a country of contradictions, battered, war-torn, divided, misguided and miraculous: an Italy where life is costume and the performance of art, and where circuses spring up on wasteland”; while the New York Times version says the characters “populate what is ultimately a love song to a country of contradictions: battered, divided, misguided and miraculous. This is an Italy where life is performance, where circuses rise on wasteland.”

A spokesperson for the New York Times told the Guardian that Preston would no longer write for the paper. Preston wrote six reviews for the paper between 2021 and 2026, but told the New York Times he had not used AI to aid any of his other articles.

“I made a serious mistake in using an AI tool on a draft review I had written, and I failed to identify and remove overlapping language from another review that the AI dropped in,” Preston said in his statement to the Guardian. “I am hugely embarrassed by what happened and truly sorry. I took responsibility immediately and apologised to the New York Times, and I also want to apologise to Christobel Kent and to the Guardian.”

Preston has written extensively for the Observer and the FT, as well as contributing to the Guardian and the Economist. He is a six-time author whose most recent book, A Stranger in Corfu, was published in February, and is also the head of advisory at investment management firm Man Group. Earlier this year, he wrote a piece for the Man Group site titled The AI Bubble: Hidden Risks and Opportunities.

The Hay literary festival has dropped its principal sponsor after boycotts from speakers and performers over the firm’s links to Israel and fossil fuel companies.

The singer Charlotte Church and the comedian Nish Kumar were among the latest to pull out over the investment management firm Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship of the festival.

On Friday afternoon the festival said it was ending its sponsorship deal with the company.

The Hay chief executive, Julie Finch, said the decision had been taken “in light of claims raised by campaigners and intense pressure on artists to withdraw”.

“Our first priority is to our audience and our artists,” she added. “Above all else, we must preserve the freedom of our stages and spaces for open debate and discussion, where audiences can hear a range of perspectives.”

Though Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship has been “suspended” for 2024, the festival plans, as it does each year, to review all of its sponsorships before next year’s event. Festival organisers also plan to meet with Fossil Free Books (FFB), the group that has been leading the campaign against Baillie Gifford, after this year’s festival.

Baillie Gifford began sponsoring the Hay festival in 2016 and was its principal sponsor. A Baillie Gifford spokesperson said: “It is regrettable our sponsorship with the festival cannot continue.”

Church pulled out of her scheduled appearance on Thursday night, issuing a statement via her social media channels to say that she had decided to boycott the festival “in solidarity with the people in Palestine and in protest of the artwashing and greenwashing that is apparent in this sponsorship”.

Kumar, the Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti and Dawn Butler MP were also among those scheduled to appear who chose to drop out over the issue.

Announcing his withdrawal on X, Kumar shared a latest statement from FFB that has now been signed by more than 700 writers and publishing industry professionals. The statement reiterated the group’s previous demands that the company cease its investments in the fossil fuel industry, and also demanded that Baillie Gifford divest “from companies that profit from Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide”, as it believes that “solidarity with Palestine and climate justice are inextricably linked”.

Some signatories of FFB’s statement decided to still attend Hay, including George Monbiot. Before he began his event discussing neoliberalism on Thursday night, the Guardian columnist and campaigner said he had decided not to boycott the festival, partly because he believed the Hay festival to be “a good cause”.

“We can’t just point to one instance of this Earth-eating, people-eating system and say that, and that alone is the problem,” he added.

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Responding to FFB’s statement last week, Baillie Gifford reiterated that just 2% of its clients’ money was invested in “companies with some business related to fossil fuels”, compared with the market average of 11%.

A spokesperson from the asset manager also told the Guardian that divesting in the way FFB had asked was not possible, because of regulations all UK asset managers must follow. “When it comes to subjective ethical situations relating to particular sectors (such as fossil fuels) or countries (such as Israel), our clients set the parameters and determine what to exclude or divest,” they said.

Baillie Gifford remains the sponsor of a number of literary festivals, including the Edinburgh international book festival and Cheltenham literature festival, as well as the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction.

Edinburgh has put out a statement responding to FFB’s statement and festival boycotts, saying it wants to “work together with Fossil Free Books, and other groups, as we move towards a more sustainable future”, while organisers “continue to speak to Baillie Gifford, and our other sponsors, about these complex issues”.

A writer has been dropped by her agent and publisher after she posted a slew of reviews from fake accounts on book-ranking site Goodreads.

Cait Corrain, whose book Crown of Starlight was due to be published in May next year, posted on X to apologise for her behaviour. “I boosted the rating of my book, bombed the ratings of several fellow debut authors, and left reviews that ranged from kind of mean to downright abusive,” she tweeted.

Corrain’s US publisher Del Rey, an imprint of Penguin Random House, stated on Monday that it was “aware of the ongoing discussion” about the author. Crown of Starlight “is no longer on our 2024 publishing schedule”, it said. Though it was initially unclear whether this meant that the book’s publication was being postponed or cancelled, both Del Rey and Corrain’s UK publisher Daphne Press later said that neither Crown of Starlight nor the second book in Corrain’s contract will be published by them.

Corrain’s former agent, Rebecca Podos, announced on Monday that she will no longer be working with Corrain. “Cait and I will not be continuing our partnership moving forward. I deeply appreciate the patience of those directly impacted by last week’s events as I worked through a difficult situation,” she wrote in a post on X.

Canadian author Xiran Jay Zhao first brought attention to Corrain’s suspicious activity on Wednesday last week when they identified a number of accounts that had up-voted Crown of Starlight and left one-star reviews on other debut novels.

They posted a 31-page Google document containing screenshots of the activity of a number of accounts, with usernames including “Chantal B” and “Oh Se-Young”, suspected to have been created by Corrain. Many of the books given one-star ratings were written by people of colour, including So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole, scheduled for release in January 2024, and To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods, by fellow Del Rey author Molly X Chang, which will be released next April.

Corrain tweeted that they had negatively ranked Chang, Cole, Danielle Jensen and Bethany Baptiste, adding that “it’s possible there are a couple of other authors” affected.

“I can’t believe Del Rey spent half a million dollars on this when they could have spent half a million dollars on anything else. Sorry not sorry,” read one of the review screenshots of Chang’s book, posted by a user called Brett Spinner. The review was liked by Chantal B.

“There’s something extra despicable about using clearly POC [people of colour] names in the fake accounts to upvote every negative review on POC books so the top ones are all 1 star and 2 star. Like what in the yellow face,” Zhao tweeted. Many of the accounts linked on the document Zhao shared have now been deleted.

A review of Corrain’s book, posted under the username Oh Se-Young, called Corrain a “f*cking genius”.

“I love this book so much that I regret reading it because now nothing on my TBR sounds interesting by comparison,” it stated.

Corrain claimed a friend was responsible for fake reviews, and shared several screenshots of a conversation in which the author berates “Lilly” for posting the ratings. Corrain later admitted that the screenshots were fabricated, and that the “friend” was “nonexistent”.

In an X post, Corrain said that they had been “fighting a losing battle against depression, alcoholism and substance abuse” and changed medication in late November. They explained that on 2 December they “suffered a complete psychological breakdown” and created “roughly six profiles on Goodreads”. Along with two profiles created “during a similar but shorter breakdown in 2022”, they used the accounts to post the negative reviews of other books and to boost their own.

Corrain said that they felt “no ill will” towards the targeted authors. “It was just my fear about how my book would be received running out of control,” they added. “I’m sorrier than you’ll ever know.”

The intended purpose of Goodreads is for readers to track books they have read and share their thoughts with an online community. The website’s community guidelines state: “Artificially inflating or deflating a book’s ratings or reputation violates our rules. This includes activity like creating fake accounts to manipulate book ratings, purchasing reviews, and incentivising votes, likes, or other actions on Goodreads.” However, “review-bombing”, a term that refers to when users negatively review books they have not read, often before the book is even out, has increasingly become an issue – and one that can have real-world consequences.

In June 2023, Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert, decided not to go ahead with the publication of a novel that had been due to come out in February 2024 after she received hundreds of negative ratings on Goodreads, criticising her for setting the book in Russia, which was viewed as insensitive to Ukrainian readers.

Following Corrain’s admission on X, Goodreads confirmed that the reviews from the author’s various accounts had been removed, and said in a statement that it “takes the responsibility of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of ratings and protecting our community of readers and authors very seriously.”