Books by People – Defending Organic Literature in an AI World

I think for me I’m just going to accept that I won’t be reading any modern fiction, likely ever. It isn’t like there isn’t more than I could read in multiple lifetimes already out there that is pre, say, 2010. But the other side is that fiction has never been worse, because the commercial impetus to become a published fiction writer has never been lower (literally since before the 1600s, given functional literacy levels and the amount of fiction reading the average person does). The Steinbecks of the world aren’t writing novels in 2025.

I like the term “organic literature.” A significant amount of readers have no interest whatsoever in generated prose, so there is definitely a viable market in human provenance.

An independent certification body is quite an old-world solution for a problem like this, but I’m not sure this is something that can be done mathematically. A web of trust may be all we have.

We need this for technical books. I was a chapter into something the other day before deciding I’d been hoodwinked into reading someone’s ChatGPT output

This is inverted. AI books should come with warning labels similar to those found in cigarettes.

This idealistic objective is highly commendable, but the fight could be futile. As you would need AI to do the work of detection. Then there will be another movement to do "organic detection" of "organic content". And the story goes on.

Think of interview candidates rejected by AI and employees fired by AI, or that case where a snack pack was identified by AI as a weapon in a student's pocket. This will lead to "organic decision making".

I always wondered if there was some way to make a "proof" that some piece of work was human created.

A recording of the entire process of it's creation is one possible answer (though how are deep fakes countered)

But maybe there is some cryptographic solution involving single direction provable timestamps..

Does anyone know of anyone working on such a thing?

I wonder how this works since authors are more and more likely to use AI to spell check, fix wording, find alternate words, and all manner of other things. It might be useful to understand the “rules” for what “human” means.

I too am open for business, for a modest fee I will arrange to meet a book publisher in nyc for a firm handshake to cement a declaration from them that they are publishing books not made with AI. I will then send a formal email saying they may publish a little gold star on their book, and my preeminence as a member of the literary elite should carry it through. I'm doing this for the people because I _care_.

This is a big problem, though I would be slow to trust anyone purporting to address this problem. (Though, to their credit, this Books by People team is more credible than the bog-standard pair of 20yo Bay Area techbro grifters I expected.)

Reportedly, Kindle has already been flooded with "AI" generated books. And I've heard complaints from authors, of AI superficial rewritings of their own books being published by scammers. (So, not only "AI, write a YA novel, to the market, about a coming of age vampire young woman small town friends-to-lovers romance", but "AI, copy the top-ranked fiction books in each category on Amazon, and substitute names of things, and how things are worded.")

For now, Kindle is already requiring publishers/authors to certify on which aspects of the books AI tools were used (e.g., text, illustrations, covers), something about how the tools were used (e.g., outright generation, assistive with heavy human work, etc.), and which tools were used. So that self-reporting is already being done somewhere, just not exposed to buyers yet.

That won't stop the dishonest, but at least it will help keep the honest writers honest. For example, if you, an honest writer, consider for a moment using generative AI to first-draft a scene, an awareness that you're required to disclose that generative AI use will give you pause, and maybe you decide that's not a direction you want to go with your work, nor how you want to be known.

Incidentally, I've noticed a lot of angry anti-generative-AI sentiment among creatives like writers and artists. Much more than among us techbros. Maybe the difference is that techbros are generally positioning ourselves to profit from AI, from copyright violations, selling AI products to others, and investment scams.

Just another rent-seeker. I mostly choose books based on word of mouth recommendations or liking other things by the same author. This is very resistant to slop from AI and to the large amounts of rubbish that has always been published.

An organization with zero technical capability charging publishers recurring fees to certify something they can't actually verify?

So this is the thing that Zitron and Doctorow are always talking about? Naked grifting in the AI industry?