I love your fourth version! That's the best plot twist.

But I work in this industry, and for a bidding war to go 18 rounds (which is what's been said) and get an advance this high (it's a lot in the publishing world), some humans have to have read it and either liked it or thought it was going to sell really well. But your speculation is more amusing (and sci-fi) than mine. Bravo.

> Let’s examine a third version: the people investing $2.4M into this book use AI in their evaluation process.

On that note, LLMs exhibit "self-bias", so knowing what kind of model does the judging helps you tailor your thing to its prejudices, even if just by using the same model to "spruce up the woring so that this wins a competition."

Further along that spectrum is adversarial models where you create a new model designed to bamboozle the judge, but that's a lot more work.