Let’s get something straight. I’m not a robot. I’m a flesh-and-blood human author alarmed by the rising tsunami of AI-generated books threatening to wash away everything that’s sacred about art, beauty, the meaning of life, tea, cake and, by the way, international copyright law.
Adding insult to injury, I’m flabbergasted by the emerging need to assert that the books I write (indeed, everything I write, or have ever written, including this blog post) is generated by my squishy human brain and converted to digital form solely by the action of my fingers bashing away on a computer keyboard. In short, there’s nothing artificial to see here, nor has there ever been, so move along, please.
Thanks goodness, then, for the Human Authored logo scheme, created by the Society of Authors in partnership with the US Authors Guild, which enables authors like me to stand tall and declare their writing is the creation of a living human being, and hasn’t been spewed out by generative AI. Having enthusiastically signed up to the scheme, I’m now able to verify my work as being written by a human, and brand it as such using the official Human Authored logo.
The terms of the scheme mean I can use the logo on my most recently published books. Why not the rest? Because they were all originally published before 2020, in that halcyon era before AI developed the wherewithal to produce humanesque writing. This means the majority of my backlist is above suspicion (although the cynic in me suspects there will be people out there who won’t realise this, probably the same people who say, ‘Sheesh, check out those old-school computer effects,’ when they see the jerky stop-motion animation in the original 1933 King Kong).
This same cynicism gives rise to the niggling fear that, since only some of my books carry the Human Authored logo, some people might assume those that don’t carry the logo were written using generative AI, despite the self-evident ‘before 2020’ rule which means they can’t have been. The scheme’s FAQs acknowledge this dilemma thus:
- Q: What does it mean if a book doesn’t use the Human Authored label?
- A: The scheme does not imply that books which are not registered as Human Authored have been created with generative AI.
Despite this minor misgiving, I think the Human Authored logo scheme is a bloody marvellous idea, and I’m proud to be associated with it. As generative AI continues to impact all our lives, I believe it is vital that we clearly define and rigorously protect not only the human creative process, but what it means to be human at all.
Graham Edwards 