John Dean – Crime Writer

Here’s a brilliant idea. Faced with growing concern that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is drawing on writers’ work without acknowledgement, copyright permission or paying for it, the Society of Authors (SoA) has come up with a kite mark which identifies a piece of work as created by a human being.

The Human Authored scheme helps identify works written by humans in a market increasingly flooded by AI-generated books and is the first of its kind launched by a UK trade association to help protect an entire profession.

According to the SoA, the move comes in the absence of any measure by the Government to compel tech companies to label AI-generated outputs, which has left readers struggling to distinguish between books written by a human, and machine-generated work based on AI models that have been trained on copyrighted work without permission or payment, says the Society.

The Society of Authors’ scheme allows authors to register their books and download a ‘Human Authored’ logo to display on the back cover.

Children’s author and SoA Fellow Malorie Blackman OBE, one of the writers backing the scheme, said: “The ‘Human Authored’ scheme seeks to highlight the imagination, commitment, craft and care taken to produce stories and books which can be enjoyed by everyone.

“Any creative endeavour requires time, effort, a willingness to learn from mistakes and failure, and a determination to persevere – lifelong, essential skills which cannot be learned and honed by allowing AI to do all of our creative thinking and production for us.

“Surely part of the pleasure of reading, listening to songs, watching films and dramas, looking at an artwork and in fact, sharing any creative endeavour is that sense of connection with the content creator, that feeling that they are speaking to you on some deep, emotional level that is 0entirely absent when the work has been produced by AI.”

Anna Ganley, Chief Executive of the Society of Authors, said: “Since generative AI platforms have become mainstream, the SoA has been campaigning to defend authors’ interests and safeguard creators against the wholescale theft of their work by AI tech companies to train their AI chatbots. Our new labelling scheme is an important sticking plaster to protect and promote human creativity in lieu of AI labelled content in the marketplace.

“In a recent survey, 82% of our author members told us they would be interested in a ‘Human Authored’ certification scheme. And while we believe the onus should be on tech companies and online retailers to label AI-generated content, until that happens, we have listened to our members and we’re providing a means for them to identify their work as being created with their uniquely human skill, hard work and originality.”

Initially, the scheme will be open to SoA members only, free of charge. The longer-term aim is to open this scheme to non-members.

You can find out more about the society’s work at https://societyofauthors.org/