Your Next Great Read Might Be Certified ‘Organic’

As scandals involving the use of artificial intelligence by professional authors pile up, a British startup has established a way for publishers to certify their books as “organic”—written by real people, no machines in sight.

On Wednesday, Books by People confirmed it had received approval from the UK’s Intellectual Property Office to begin distributing a mark that indicates a published book has been authored by a human. The stamp, which looks like a thumbprint, will be displayed on the cover.

“If people are going to be writing AI books or seeking it out for their own enjoyment, that’s their prerogative,” Esme Dennys, cofounder of Books by People, tells WIRED. “But if you want to read something that’s written by a person, you should be able to find that. We’re just trying to create that choice.”

Previous book-labeling schemes, like Human Authored, have operated under an honesty system, where an author promises they haven’t used AI in the development process. To try to add more weight to its certification, Books by People asks for an authorship declaration, runs each manuscript through proprietary software, and manually examines early drafts and research materials supplied by the writer and editor for “indicators of humanity.”

The organization is "looking at all the things that give us the best sense of whether a person wrote the work—whether the work was made during a natural process of drafting and redrafting,” says Dennys.

Books by People will charge publishers a flat membership fee, plus an additional sum for every book they put forward for certification. Five publishers have signed up so far. The startup expects the new mark to feature on its first book by the end of the year.

This year, the publishing industry has been caught up in a flurry of scandals involving the suspected use of AI by authors. A literary agent canceled a book deal reportedly worth $2 million; a publisher withdrew a novel from the shelves; readers alleged that a prize-winning short story had been generated with AI.

Writers and publishers are not necessarily worried about being replaced by AI, industry insiders tell WIRED. They believe that few people will ultimately want to read machine-generated books.

“You are essentially standing at the end of a conveyor belt, watching stuff fall off the edge. Once you know that, it prevents you from getting really emotionally invested in whatever falls into your hands from the belt,” says sci-fi author Ted Chiang, whose 1998 novella Story of Your Life was adapted into the Academy Award–winning film Arrival. “The knowledge of how something was created cannot be separated from your experience.”

However, repeated scandals could shake public confidence in the unspoken rule of publishing: That every book that reaches the shelf has been authored by a real person who has not indulged in plagiarism.

“Publishing has always relied on trust between the publisher, writer, and reading public. Cases where that trust is betrayed have been rare,” says Sam Jordison, codirector at independent publisher Galley Beggar Press, which intends to adopt the Books by People mark. “There’s almost a feeling of revulsion about the idea of reading an AI text that purports to be human. It feels like a con job.”

Against that backdrop, the idea of a certification for human-authored books has received backing from various writers and editors. In a statement praising Books by People, Markus Dohle, former CEO of Penguin Random House, described human storytelling as “the lifeblood of our industry.”

But while publishers might relish the chance to signal their commitment to “organic literature,” the routinization of AI detection is a double-edged sword for authors, who risk a false positive result spoiling their reputation.

“We need to be quite careful that this doesn’t end up becoming a witch hunt,” says Tom West, CEO of the Publishers’ Licensing Services, which helps publishers to collectively license works to third parties. “Obviously, the devil is going to be in the detail.”

New York–based startup Pangram, which has emerged as the leader in the field of AI detection, claims to be able to sniff out generated text with a 99.7 percent accuracy. But authors have questioned the reliability of its approach, which itself involves AI.

In September, Jerry Falade, the debut author whose agent reportedly pulled the $2 million book deal, alleged that detection software had misconstrued his Nigerian dialect as evidence he had used AI. Pangram’s software scored the book as 97 percent AI-generated. “It takes months, even years to write a book,” Falade wrote in a recent essay. “It takes AI-detection software two minutes to ruin your life’s work.”

Others have warned against normalizing extreme scrutiny of authors. They claim the labeling schemes have it backward; the onus should be on platforms and publishers to declare when a piece of media is AI-generated, not when it’s written by a person. “Authors are being constantly quizzed about the origins of their ideas and their work. I think that’s something we need to resist,” says West. “The default should be that a book is human-authored.”

Approved by the Intellectual Property Office alongside the mark, Books by People’s verification process is different to Pangram’s technology-first approach, placing greater weight on interrogating documents and communication trails for signs of humanity. “I wouldn’t call it AI detection,” says Dennys. “We realized pretty early on that, as AI models get better, getting into that race is never going to be sustainable.”

In cases where Books by People is uncertain whether a piece of evidence indicates AI use, it claims to err on the side of the author. “When you have a public process that has been vetted, all we can do is make sure that a book has gone through the process,” says Dennys. “The bedrock of our organization is to avoid [writers] being unjustly accused.”

Some authors say the important thing is that publishers underscore their commitment to human-authored literature as a nonnegotiable standard for the industry, in whatever way they can. Even if methods for policing the rule are flawed.

“It’s just as important for publishers to have a ‘no cheating’ policy as it is for universities, even if there’s no perfect method for enforcement,” says Chiang. “It’s a statement of values.”