The Authors Guild, one of the largest associations of writers in America, is launching a new project to certify books that have been written by a human rather than a machine. The new “Human Authored” certification will help authors distinguish their work and let readers know what they are reading—and paying for—is something that was actually produced with genuine effort and creativity. Because who wants to waste their limited time reading a book the author did not put any care into?
The new certification is limited to members of the Authors Guild, but the association says it will expand to non-Guild members in the future. Anyone will be able to visit a public database to see books that have been given human certification. To qualify, books must be almost entirely written by humans, with a small exception for the use of AI-powered grammar tools like Grammarly.
This is good in the sense that readers ought to know they are not about to read soulless, generated slop. At the same time, the new certification assumes that AI-generated content will be the default going forward, which feels depressing. It is sad that some people believe AI could be as good, if not better, than humans at creating works of art. Generative AI cannot relate to people or produce original thoughts—it scrapes the web for information already out there and parrots what it has learned from others. Similar to an actual parrot reciting words it has heard before, it does not feel like a chatbot’s output has any soul. One cannot relate to a bot that does not have its own lived experiences to share.
But out of financial motivation or sheer laziness, we have already seen Amazon inundated with AI-generated books, and recently a popular romance writer was caught using AI when they inadvertently left chatbot output in a newly published book. AI is coming to books whether we like it or not.
Books with AI should be the ones that have to identify themselves, but it is probably a lot easier to get human authors to sign up for labeling their books, rather than trying to go to every book publisher and harangue them into identifying what within their libraries is AI-generated.
Anyone who has been on X or LinkedIn recently has surely seen the flood of generic content that has flooded those platforms. The content often has a similar style and structure signaling it has been generated by one of the more popular AI models, and contributes nothing new to the conversation. Comments such as, “The rise of generative AI raises serious questions about the future of labor that should be considered” are vacuous and contribute nothing new to the conversation.
“The Human Authored initiative isn’t about rejecting technology — it’s about creating transparency, acknowledging the reader’s desire for human connection, and celebrating the uniquely human elements of storytelling,” Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said in a statement to The Verge.
At a time when there is immense anxiety over the possibility of CEOs using AI to cheaply replace workers (even if it is not as good), particularly in white-collar fields, there is a belief that innate human creativity will become more important than ever. Proponents of AI say that it can help make people more efficient, but ultimately a human will need to remain in the loop to imbue work with a soul that only a human can provide. Generative AI video generators might be able to help produce an animated film more affordably, but creativity will still be required to make something compelling. And similar to handmade, artisan crafts, people will be willing to pay a premium for creative works that have been made with care, or so the thinking goes.
The U.S. Copyright Office issued guidance this month that works created solely using generative AI cannot be copyrighted, because the author does not have much control over the outputs of typical AI models. “Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements,” a report from the office says. Human-created works with AI elements can still be copyrighted as a whole, like a comic strip that uses AI to generate some elements, but any aspects of the work that were created using AI will not be protected under the new guidance. Copyright is intended to protect original works created by a person and reward them for putting effort into making it; if a bot does all the work, a human did not really make it at all.
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