I would definitely ask your editor if they use AI and if so, in what capacity. As a writer, you need to know this because too much AI used or used in the wrong way could put your ability to copyright your story. A reputable editor should have no issues being transparent about their use of AI (and/or disclose what 3rd party programs they use when working on your project). If your editor/proofreader/etc. is cagey about answering your questions, I wouldn’t work with them.

If you were worried about this, another option would be to ask them to sign a disclosure that states they will not use AI while working on your project (and be clear about what you mean by AI). Likewise, if you are okay with certain programs that use AI (like Grammarly) list those out as exceptions.

Does anyone have suggestions for being confident that an editor I am paying lots of $$$$$ will not take shortcuts with AI to finish faster? I assume we can rely on recommendations from friends and colleagues, but many of us are all pretty much at the same place with our first book.
Thank you

Thanks for asking! Becca and I are looking at how to incorporate AI in an ethical way. We agree it can be useful and would be especially helpful with our tools but again, we need to make sure we do it the right way.

Kay, there is no legislation around this, and unfortunately, it’s not often clear what constitutes a copyright breach. For instance, we know ChatGPT has used our books to train their models, but because the AI output is stated differently than our original content, and because they’re adding other information to it, there’s an argument that it has been transformed from the original so it’s not a breach of our copyright.

One thing we’ve done is add a clause to the copyright page of each of our books that states that our content cannot be used to train AI models without our consent. You can find that clause here: https://authorsguild.org/news/practical-tips-for-authors-to-protect-against-ai-use-ai-copyright-notice-and-web-crawlers/

Is there a way an author can legally prevent AI from using the author’s material to educate the bot? I thought I saw this somewhere.

Thanks, Mike. I think we all will have to find a way forward, and as always, it’s about putting readers first that lights the way. 🙂

Thanks for stopping in, Carol 🙂

Hi Rebecca,

Right now the Author’s Guild is working on a Human Authored designation that can be added to the cover of a book and this will tell your readers it is not AI-generated. https://www.marketplace.org/2024/10/07/authors-guild-human-authored-label-ai/

Whether it will be recognized/carry weight beyond the reader knowing it is human authored that we will have to see. Right now Amazon forces a person to clarify whether a book uses AI (they have parameters for what this means). I think one we have clear legislation around the use of AI we’ll see the commercial side of things respond to protect themselves legally.

Agree, legislation is really needed. We need clear framework around fair use and people should have to opt in to being scraped, not be forced to opt out.

The one thing to remember though is that even using it to improve your sentences to clarify what you are writing or to use it for research and brainstorm, someone’s work was taken to train AI to have those capabilities. I’m not saying people shouldn’t use AI – everyone needs to make their own decisions, just clarifying that technically there is no use of it that if free from an ethical conversation.