Human Authored is the New Organic

Authors Guild to offer Tags for Human Authors to Compete with AI

Credit: The Authors Guild)

It’s a sign of the times. Marketplace — Daily business news and economic stories from Marketplace reports that The Authors Guild, the professional association representing published novelists and nonfiction writers, will offer its 15,000 members a new certificate they can place directly on their book covers. Authors concerned about the market being flooded with written material that is AI generated believe it is important to distinguish human writing as opposed to to those taking a shortcut.

Douglas Preston, a bestselling novelist and nonfiction writer and member of the Authors Guild Council speaking on the subject suggests it not just about addressing fraud and deception — he stresses “It’s also a declaration of how important storytelling is to who we are as a species. And we’re not going to let machines elbow us aside and pretend to be telling us stories, when it’s just regurgitating literary vomitus.”

NEW BOOKS EVERY YEAR

Every year somewhere between half a million to a million new titles come out in the U.S. alone. The market for reading customers is quite saturated and there are likely to be more AI material rushed out into the world.

There have been a number of comparative surveys of human. content vs AI and it is pretty widely accepted that SI cannot at this point hold a candle to humans writing.

There are things that AI can do like provide proofreading, but that can be done with several spell check programs that can also offer grammar advice.

The fear of AI replacing authors gets a lot of talk, and such threats do create a fair amount of anxiety in the industries. In this past year some magazines have used AI to publish content. One such example was Sports Illustrated. The content was pretty bad. The editors used a fake by line as the author. They were caught and embarrassed on one hand due to the poor quality of the writing, but search efforts for the fake author’s name could cot AI in any industry, including publishing. AI and automation can take over routine tasks, leading to concerns about job losses, especially in the areas of basic content creation and editing come up with a real writer on staff by the name and when people pressed Sports Illustrated, they had to fess up.

The other thing about AI that authors dislike is that the process used by AI searching massive amounts of content for writing ideas. Writers consider the fact that this is done with no consideration for the original authors time and energy, no credit, and no compensation. There presently a few lawsuits that will be making their way through the courts soon. This may down the road put more constraints on this practice, or the courts may be open to expanding the rights of AI companies for their business model. In any event, serious writers generally find issues with the ethnicity of AI in publishing. In the meantime look for writing trade organizations look for more ways to highlight the importance of human intelligence and emotion being paramount to quality literature.