A new scheme has been launched to distinguish between books written by humans and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Spearheaded by the Society of Authors (SoA), the scheme allows authors to register their books and download a “Human Authored” logo to display on their back cover.
Launched by the novelist Tracy Chevalier at the London Book Fair on Tuesday, the scheme mirrors a similar movement in the US in 2025 by the Authors Guild.
Author Malorie Blackman said the scheme “seeks to highlight the imagination, commitment, craft and care taken to produce stories and books which can be enjoyed by everyone”.
She added: “Any creative endeavour requires time, effort, a willingness to learn from mistakes and failure, and a determination to persevere – lifelong, essential skills which cannot be learned and honed by allowing AI to do all of our creative thinking and production for us.
“Surely part of the pleasure of reading, listening to songs, watching films and dramas, looking at an artwork and in fact, sharing any creative endeavour is that sense of connection with the content creator, that feeling that they are speaking to you on some deep, emotional level that is entirely absent when the work has been produced by AI.”
Anna Ganley, chief executive of the SoA, said their new labelling scheme is “an important sticking plaster to protect and promote human creativity in lieu of AI labelled content in the marketplace”.
She said: “Since generative AI platforms have become mainstream, the SoA has been campaigning to defend authors’ interests and safeguard creators against the wholescale theft of their work by AI tech companies to train their AI chatbots.”
It comes as around 10,000 authors came together to publish an empty book in protest of the unauthorised use of their work by AI firms.
Richard Osman, Jeanette Winterson, and Kazuo Ishiguro are among the writers to have participated in the project.
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Copies of Don’t Steal This Book, which is empty except for the names of the authors involved, were distributed at the London book fair on Tuesday.
The organiser of Don’t Steal This Book, Ed Newton-Rex, a composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the AI industry was “built on stolen work [....] taken without permission or payment”.
Copyrighted work, such as books taken from the open web, is among the extensive data used by generative AI to develop tools such as chatbots.
This has led to dozens of lawsuits from authors and publishers in recent years. In 2025 Anthropic, the leading AI firm behind the Claude chatbot, agreed to settle a £1.1bn class-action lawsuit by book authors who said the start-up used pirated copies of their works to train its product.
The government has been approached for comment.
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