Back to basics (1): I am not a robot — Anne Rooney

 

Last month, Hachette pulled Shy Girl by Mia Ballard, the first case of a major publisher cancelling a book because the author used gernerative AI in its creation. Last month, also, the Society of Authors launched its Human Authored initiative, a scheme to allow authors and publishers to declare that a book has a human author.* There are other marks and schemes that also aim to protect and recognise the value of human creativity. It's very sad that this is needed, and that we can't instead get AI-generated content labelled as such, but that's the world we are in right now and this is better than nothing.

Most contracts that an author signs with a respectable publisher  require a declaration that AI hasn't been used to produce the book. There is a huge debate to be had about what constitutes using AI to produce a book, with some people saying they 'only' use it for plot problems, suggesting names or places, correcting grammar, or any other isolated (or not so isolated) task in the whole process. My view is that you shouldn't be using it for anything. If you can't work out a plot and write grammatically, you're not up to being a professional writer yet, so go learn. But there are a wide range of views, and I'm not here to argue the case. The point here is that if you have signed a contract that says you won't use AI, or even adopted a mark that claims you haven't used AI, what happens if you are asked to prove you wrote the whole thing yourself? What if Mia Ballard were wrongly accused? (I'm not suggesting she was, by the way.) How do writers protect themselves from the accusation that because they use em dashes or triplets or some other spurious bit of 'proof', that they 'obviously' used AI to write their books? It's a question that has been clogging up writers' spaces on the web for a while now. 

Drafts — you worked to improve it!

One obvious thing you can do is to keep drafts. These are dated and show the slow build-up of your book over time. Another is to note all your sources. My drafts are heavily footnoted with sources for everything that isn't such common knowledge that it doesn't need to be verified. 

I usually write non-fiction, but when I write fiction I also footnote anything that comes from research. Originally, this was so that I could check facts, or deal with queries from editors and translators (and sometimes readers), but now it serves a useful additional purpose in proving I did actually do the research and the sources do exist, unlike those invented by ChatGPT and other LLMs. 

Books — show where you got the info

 

 Sources are often books, with page numbers included in the reference; I don't see LLMs being able to do that accurately, even if they tried. If it's a book I have, I don't include edition details. If it's a book in the library, the footnote includes the library classmark so I can get the same copy back if necessary. All these footnotes are deleted when I send the MS to the publisher, but I have them if I need them.

 

Cards — very analogue, very niche

Another thing I've started doing recently is making more handwritten notes and plans. I'm currently working on a proposal for a book on extinct animals and, after many years of duplicating the same research, I've decided I need my own card index (not a database on the computer — a physical object) of organisms through time. It will have everything I need for the animals that might be in this book and I can add to it later for other books. It's on the computer as well, but I print out the entries and stick them to cards. They're easy to shuffle, sort, annotate and pick out for different purposes. 

I keep too many notebooks, so scraps for different books tend to be spread around, but I'm going to start at least colour-coding them so I can hook them out if needed. I have a proper paper trail, in the original sense of the term. I'm also occasionally posting to Bluesky and Instagram photos of ongoing work and commenting on where I've got to with things. This, too, will be evidence that I didn't knock up a book with a few crafty prompts one rainy afternoon.

I hope none of this will ever be needed, but if it is, it's there and hard to contest. I suppose I could have gone to the trouble of getting AI to do all this and then cutting it up or writing it out by hand and doing all this over a period of many months, but it would be more work than just writing the book (and would produce a rubbish book). I hope other writers, worried about this, are doing similar things. Please share your tips in the comments. And it's honestly nice to return to a less digital way of doing things. Cut and paste with scissors and a glue stick, just like the old days. (Though it was Spraymount and a scalpel when I was last being paid to do cut-and-paste, back in the dark ages.)

 

* The SoA scheme does allow limited use of AI in preparatory work, but not in generation of the text or images, following the precedent set by the Writers' Guild

Anne Rooney

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Out now:

 

For adults; Arcturus, December 2025

 

 

For children; The Magnificent Book of Microscopic Creatures, February 2025 (I like the French cover better than the UK/US cover, but you can also get it in English!