The label will be about the same size as book stickers denoting literary awards, or being selected for a celebrity book club, Marketplace explains. The site quotes Douglas Preston, bestselling novelist, nonfiction writer and member of the Authors Guild Council, offering this explanation. It's not just to "prevent fraud and deception," but also to show "how important storytelling is to who we are as a species," Preston said. He added, "we're not going to let machines elbow us aside and pretend to be telling us stories, when it's just regurgitating literary vomitus."
Those are some sweet -- and even spicy -- words. Preston is an acclaimed writer, after all. His rallying cry taps into one of the key arguments against certain uses of AI, which is to generate meaningless content to grab attention, fill web pages, and even sneakily grab advertising revenues away from sites offering genuine "Human Authored" content. This content is already known as "AI slop," and it's so pervasive that a recent study showed Google's search algorithms can be gamed to make them prefer slop over meaningful human-made content.
"Human Authored" is a clever move, if you think about it. It's the inverse of the "made by AI" labels that tech industry figures think need to be slapped on stuff spewed out by a generative AI system. The Author's Guild is also tapping into the same vibe as "organic product" labels on food, or handmade products sold on Etsy, clearly from a small or solo entrepreneur's business. The difference, based on the underlying sensibility of the Author's Guild mark, is that it's celebrating the thumbprints in the clay pot, or the cute handwritten labels a customer sees when their purchase arrives at their door. Things that lack the smooth mass-made quality of most factory-produced wares, but carry that emotional tingle of being created by people with a pulse are distinctive.