Since 2022, at the Society of Authors, we’ve been asking ourselves this question regularly: how did we get here?
With a world-leading copyright framework, authors had been well-protected by UK law, which up until the advent of generative AI had protected the rights of creators. Yet today, we see just how fragile the UK copyright framework is. With the industrial-scale infringement of authors’ works, and a complete disregard for copyright by Big Tech, we have a David versus Goliath size battle on our hands.
For authors, it is a triple blow. Firstly, there is the illegal piracy of their books available on shadow online libraries that has led to mass copyright infringement by tech companies using pirated copies to train their AI models. And then the outputs from these AI models now compete with human authored works in an opaque online marketplace. Each of these issues need tackling in order to fully protect authors’ rights.
The UK Human Authored Scheme aims to address one of these issues: the lack of transparency in the online marketplace. While we think AI-generated content should be labelled clearly, there is a reluctance from online retailers to do this. Of course, we will keep the pressure on to effect this change, but until that happens, we wanted to do something practical to help authors now.
As a member of the International Authors’ Forum, we work closely with writers’ organisations around the world. And as this is a global issue, we need a global response. The UK Human Authored Scheme is the result of a close collaboration with the US Authors Guild who launched their Human Authored scheme in February 2025.
Our shared desire is to build a global network of Human Authored schemes to enable authors around the world to demonstrate that their books are created by a human, not generated by AI. Over the last 12 months, we have worked with the Authors Guild to develop a new iteration of the Human Authored logo so that it can be used across both territories, and we are delighted to launch this new logo in March 2026.
We hope that writers’ organisations around the world will want to get involved and implement a Human Authored Scheme in their country, too. International collaboration is important because in a global marketplace, AI-generated content is competing with human authored works and potentially cannibalising authors’ book sales.
Authors and consumers should have transparency about the provenance of books published, how they are made, and how they are advertised. More than anything, the Human Authored Scheme celebrates the blood, sweat and tears of human creativity. The years of hard work, honing of craft and skill. This scheme provides human authors with additional labelling to help demonstrate this.
During the development of the Scheme, we worked very hard to make the Human Authored definition realistic and practical for the AI-powered world in which we now live. So, while the Human Authored logo means that the text of a work has been created by a human, not generated by a series of AI prompts, we are cognizant that there will be minimal uses made of AI for checking spelling and grammar, for brainstorming or for research purposes.
At the moment, the Scheme is only open to SoA members with books published in the UK so that we can manage demand for registrations, but our aspiration is to open the Scheme to non-members in future. We also had to make a pragmatic judgment in order to manage demand for registrations, and so 2020 is the threshold we landed on for backdated registrations to the Scheme. After all, generative AI was not mainstream before then.
Ultimately, I see this Scheme as a ‘sticking plaster’ for a broken system. We need to regulate and adapt the online marketplace to reflect the new reality of generative AI. As an eternal optimist, I remain hopeful that we can work with UK Government to fix this system, to create a new regulatory framework that supports the rights of authors and creators, not undermine them.
We welcome the recent House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee recommendations that call on Government to commit to meaningful transparency and clear labelling of AI‑generated content. But until we get this, the Human Authored labelling scheme is here to stay.
At the time of writing, Government is due to respond to its Copyright and Artificial Intelligence consultation on 18 March 2026. We will wait and see.
About the UK Human Authored Scheme
The UK Human Authored Scheme, administered by the Society of Authors, is an author-led labelling scheme, run by authors for authors – and it’s FREE to SoA members.