This week the UK Intellectual Property Office approved a certification mark from Books by People, a British startup that checks whether books were written by humans. The mark is a small thumbprint printed on the cover, and the first certified titles should appear by the end of the year. Five publishers have joined so far. The mark is now legally registered, so a publisher who puts it on a book that hasn't been certified can be challenged.
The approval follows a difficult year for publishing. His agent withdrew a $2 million deal for Jerry Falade's debut thriller after detection software scored it 97% AI-generated. Falade denies using AI to write it. In France, Thélyson Orélien's prize-winning first novel was dropped from the Goncourt longlist after an anonymous account posted detector results online. Orélien says he started the book in 2017 and finished a first draft in 2019, three years before ChatGPT was released. When journalists tested the same passages with other detectors, the results disagreed. The Goncourt also cited separate plagiarism findings in his earlier work. His publisher says it can neither confirm nor refute the allegations and has paused promotion of the book.
Books by People has chosen not to rely mainly on that kind of software. It asks authors for a declaration, then reviews their drafts, research notes and correspondence with editors. Its cofounder Esme Dennys says competing with ever-better models would not be sustainable. Organic food certification works in a similar way. No lab test can tell you how a carrot was grown, so inspectors look at the farm instead.
AI is still finding its way into the writing process in smaller ways. Authors use it to check grammar, summarise research and suggest edits. Falade says he used a small model on his own computer, but only for research, such as how a character might hide a body. Any certification scheme will have to decide which of these uses count, and its decisions will be disputed. Some in the industry worry that books without a stamp will come to be seen as suspect.
Takeaways: The Intellectual Property Office's approval gives readers a legally backed way to find books written by people, and the first ones will reach shops within months. Like food labelling, this will be useful because it tells readers how a book was made, and gives people the choice to go organic. But as ever there are grey areas, such as how much AI help a book can have and still count as human-written. At least for now, AI's writing skills are far behind the best human authors, and that should see true quality win out.