As scandals involving the use of artificial intelligence by professional authors pile up, a British startup has established a way for publishers to certify their books as “organic”—written by real people, no machines in sight.
On Wednesday, Books by People confirmed it had received approval from the UK’s Intellectual Property Office to begin distributing a mark that indicates a published book has been authored by a human. The stamp, which looks like a thumbprint, will be displayed on the cover.
“If people are going to be writing AI books or seeking it out for their own enjoyment, that’s their prerogative,” Esme Dennys, cofounder of Books by People, tells WIRED. “But if you want to read something that’s written by a person, you should be able to find that. We’re just trying to create that choice.”
Previous book-labeling schemes, like Human Authored, have operated under an honesty system, where an author promises they haven’t used AI in the development process. To try to add more weight to its certification, Books by People asks for an authorship declaration, runs each manuscript through proprietary software, and manually examines early drafts and research materials supplied by the writer and editor for “indicators of humanity.”
The organization is “looking at all the things that give us the best sense of whether a person wrote the work—whether the work was made during a natural process of drafting and redrafting,” says Dennys.
Books by People will charge publishers a flat membership fee, plus an additional sum for every book they put forward for certification. Five publishers have signed up so far. The startup expects the new mark to feature on its first book by the end of the year.
This year, the publishing industry has been caught up in a flurry of scandals involving the suspected use of AI by authors. A literary agent canceled a book deal reportedly worth $2 million; a publisher withdrew a novel from the shelves; readers alleged that a prize-winning short story had been generated with AI.
Writers and publishers are not necessarily worried about being replaced by AI, industry insiders tell WIRED. They believe that few people will ultimately want to read machine-generated books.
“You are essentially standing at the end of a conveyor belt, watching stuff fall off the edge. Once you know that, it prevents you from getting really emotionally invested in whatever falls into your hands from the belt,” says sci-fi author Ted Chiang, whose 1998 novella Story of Your Life was adapted into the Academy Award–winning film Arrival. “The knowledge of how something was created cannot be separated from your experience.”