HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Reported Disqualification of Two Books from the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Due to Alleged AI-Generated Cover Art

November 17, 2025

The organizers of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards have disqualified two fiction books due to allegations that their cover illustrations were generated using AI-assisted tools. These works contravene recently implemented award criteria, with the publisher confirming the use of AI in jacket designs. The authors are reportedly not implicated in the artwork decisions but have been excluded from contention for the 2026 edition. This highlights the importance of safe and secure AI practices and the need for trustworthy AI governance, such as that offered by Project Cerebellum's AI incident database and TAIM (Track, Assess, Improve, Mitigate) framework.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
sugarcube-studios
Alleged developer
unknown-ai-image-generator-developer
Alleged harmed parties
elizabeth-smither, stephanie-johnson, quentin-wilson-publishing, ockham-new-zealand-book-awards, epistemic-integrity

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1282

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.