As a member of the Society of Authors in the UK, I was recently sent information about a new scheme – developed with the Authors’ Guild in the US –  which allows ‘authors to register their books and download a ‘Human Authored’ logo to display on the back cover of their books, helping to identify their work as created with uniquely human skill, hard work and creative endeavour.’ The idea is to distinguish books written by real authors from books generated by AI or ‘large language models’.

I confess I felt quite shocked to think that we are now at a point where books written by actual people may have to be specially labelled.

Shouldn’t it be the other way round – that books generated by chatbots should have to be labelled as such? But the Society can explain that too: ‘The move comes in the absence of any measure by the Government to compel tech companies to label AI-generated outputs. This 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.’

I don’t like the idea that books written by hardworking authors should come to be regarded as a sort of luxury, artisanal product. I’ve seen the labels on food products which claim that the cheese is ‘hand-cut’, the slices of ham are ‘hand-placed’, the chocolates are ‘hand-dipped’, the crisps or chips are ‘hand-cooked in kettles’. This is meant to make the products sound more special, more as if a reassuring kind of human care were involved in their preparation. But this type of labelling suggests that most food products are not lovingly cut, placed or dipped by humans.

I have not registered for the ‘Human Authored’ scheme yet because I can’t quite bring myself to acknowledge that it is necessary. I would prefer governments to tackle the tech companies and make them label their products as ‘generated by AI’.