Registering my books as human authored (I can’t believe it’s come to this)

There was a time, not so long ago, when no one had to worry about being accused of using AI to generate their books/artwork/music. AIs were depicted only in science fiction, sometimes as a thing to be feared, sometimes as a useful and benevolent source of knowledge. But what science fiction almost ubiquitously got wrong was that AI would be used in the creative fields.

And yet, that’s exactly what the AI developers targeted first: the arts. Ugh.

It’s come to the point that the so-called “AI checkers” are often wrong. A popular example from recent weeks is the person who loaded a chapter of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into an AI checker, and the result it spit out was that Frankenstein was 100% AI-generated (you can read some of the discourse here.) This came on the heels of discussions regarding literary agents using the same AI checkers to scan new book submissions and eliminating some from their slush pile based on those results. (As Frankenstein’s example shows, that’s not an accurate assessment of potential AI usage in writing.)

So what can a real human author do to prove they aren’t using AI to write anything?

It’s definitely getting more difficult, but the Authors’ Guild set up a “human authored” portal a few months ago, where you can register books as human authored. When I initially looked into it, I wasn’t sure it was worth the time and the cost (sadly, it isn’t free unless you’re a member, but the membership has an annual fee too.) It also required photo ID verification, which I wasn’t terribly keen to go through, either.

What prompted me to finally register were the stories and posts regarding Frankenstein and those literary agents running submissions through the faulty AI-checkers. At $10 per registration, it cost me $110 to submit all of my books (this was still less than the cost of an annual membership.) The upside is I have a human authored registration number I’ve since put on the copyright pages of each of my books, along with a .png image that I added to the back cover of my physical books.

The Authors’ Guild Human Authored Portal is also publicly available, so authors and titles are searchable. Unfortunately for authors outside the US, I don’t believe the Authors’ Guild is an option, but the UK also recently created a similar system: UK Society of Authors launches logo to identify books written by humans not AI. I’m sure we’ll see more of these systems pop up over the next few months for authors in other countries.

There isn’t much else out there (yet) for authors to combat false accusations of using generative AI in their writing, but for now, I’ve done what I can. Of course, adding the human authored images and registration number to my books means I spent three days updating files and uploading the new versions to the various publishing portals I use (with 11 books and at least 5 files each, it was an undertaking.)

I last updated all of my books in late 2023 to include some verbiage on the copyright page stating that no AI was used in the creation of my books (the 2024 and 2025 releases had the statement included at publication.) Last week’s update was to add the human authored registration numbers and images, because I didn’t feel the blanket statement was enough any more. I can’t believe the world has come to this…

Anyway, an update to my files was overdue in some other ways too. This gave me an opportunity to add my full catalogue to the end matter of earlier books and to make some adjustments to my “about the author” page, so it wasn’t all about protecting myself.

But it’s done now, and despite the time and expense, I think it will be worth it, if only for my own peace of mind.