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Member only guide to the Australian book industry.
The emergence of generative AI tools presents both opportunities and risks to authors’ and illustrators’ professional practice. We’ve prepared some guidelines to help you try to safeguard your work and protect your interests. We will review this guidance periodically as best practice evolves.
Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Midjourney use machine learning to generate written work or images based upon a user’s inputs. These tools rely on massive training datasets to generate text and images – training datasets which include books, journals, essays, images, and articles taken and used without permission from, or payment to, creators.
The adoption of this technology is having significant impacts on the book industry, displacing authors’ and illustrators’ work and diluting the market.
AI-generated books are flooding the market, authors and illustrators are reporting diminished income from fewer job opportunities in fields like copywriting or graphic design, and some book industry professionals and publishers are using AI tools – as well as entering into licensing deals for AI training. Some authors and illustrators are also beginning to use generative AI as part of their professional practice.
It is therefore essential that authors and illustrators inform themselves about protecting their rights, industry best practice, and the risks involved in use of the technology. We provide the guidance below to equip you with the information you need to make informed decisions about your publishing agreements and your work.
Please note that the advice we provide is general guidance only, and relates to generative AI tools – large language models or multimodal foundational models (image generators). If you are seeking specific advice relating to your circumstances, please contact us via our Member Advice Service, or for legal advice, via Authors Legal.
In order to ensure you retain control over your work, are well-placed to benefit from any future licensing opportunities – if you wish – and your views about generative AI use in relation to the production of your book are respected, every publishing agreement should include AI provisions that protect your rights and safeguard your interests. Publishing agreements can last for a very long time so the ASA encourages every author and illustrator to preserve their options now.
The ASA has prepared model clauses – available in our Model Contracts for Authors and Illustrators, and our Guide to AI Clauses – drafted to put you in a position where:
In addition, the recommended AI clauses are intended to set out how generative AI might be used with respect to the production and publication of your book. For example, how do you feel about generative AI being used to translate your work into another language or design the book cover? To avoid future disputes, it’s a good idea to agree upfront the rules to which you and your publisher will adhere.
The Guide to AI Clauses is free to download for ASA members. Find these resources and more in our Information Hub.
Alternatively, for advice on specific drafting, or if you are asked to sign a contract with an AI clause that you don’t understand, please seek guidance from Authors Legal.
If you’ve already signed with a publisher, find out about their intentions when it comes to using AI for the production of your book to ensure you’re on the same page. You might wish to ask the following questions:
Neither publishers, agents, nor any other book industry professionals should upload your submission materials to commercial AI tools or AI detection tools without your express permission – doing so may infringe your copyright. Always check the submission terms to ensure you are not unknowingly consenting to AI use, and seek advice if you’re unsure.
AI detection tools are broadly unreliable, and can generate false positives (and false negatives), with serious implications for the authors involved.
For all authors and illustrators publishing content on their website or blog they’d like to protect, you may be able to restrict unauthorised scraping of your content through restricting web crawlers. To do so you will need to add or update your robots.txt file – find out how to do this via Google’s crawling helpsheet.
For self-publishing authors, the general principle should be applied: understand the terms you are agreeing to in your contracts with publishing service providers, aggregators, and distributors of your work.
Additionally, you may also want to include a ‘no AI training’ notice on the copyright or imprint page of your books. The US Authors Guild has provided an example of such a notice:
No AI Training: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to ‘train’ generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
While this is not a foolproof measure, it is a clear statement of your rights.
There is a spectrum of AI use, presenting varying levels of risk. Use of AI-powered tools such as spell-checkers is not generally viewed as unethical or warranting disclosure. However, other uses pose greater risks, including:
Only humans can be authors of a copyright work. If your manuscript is entirely or substantially generated by AI, it may not be protected under copyright law. This will have implications for submissions to publishers, grants, competitions, and awards – you will be unable to warrant that your work is original and that you own the copyright. Read more in the Australian Copyright Council’s free Artificial Intelligence and Copyright fact sheet, or contact the ACC for free legal advice.
You should also be aware that if you upload your entire manuscript into an AI tool – for example, for editing, summarising, or restructuring – the tool may be training on your work. You should ensure you understand whether the tools you are using are open or closed systems, and adjust the settings, where possible, to protect your work. Once your work has been used to train a large language model, the tool may be able to memorise or regurgitate your work in the outputs it generates.
Leaving aside copyright protection, the use of generative AI tools may impact the appeal of your work to traditional publishers. While some publishers may be using AI tools in their operations, they may have different standards for acceptable AI use for authors and illustrators (again, it is important that your publishing agreement covers permitted uses of AI by your publisher). For example, Bloomsbury has outlined for their authors/illustrators that acceptable uses of generative AI include editing, image-enhancement, or brainstorming, but not generating any text or imagery, even if it is edited afterwards. Some agents have outlined they will not accept any manuscripts that have been written or illustrated using AI, aside from AI-powered tools such as spell-checkers. This information, if provided, should be located on a publisher or agent’s submission pages.
All of the commercial large language models have been trained on massive datasets, including essays, articles, and books – without permission or payment to creators. Use of large language models is seen by many in the creative communities as tacit acceptance of, or support for, the largescale theft of their copyright work. Given the international outcry from creatives, you should be aware that use of these tools may harm your author or illustrator brand.
Creators who have not been transparent about using generative AI tools as part of their creative process have experienced backlash upon discovery of the use. Unfortunately, authors have also faced repercussions for the use of AI in publishing, even under circumstances in which they’ve been unaware of the use, such as the authors who were removed from contention for a New Zealand literary prize for books that had AI-generated covers. This is why it is important that creators ensure their interests are protected in their publishing agreements – it is the creators that have a brand with their readers, and it is the creators who will suffer the reputational damage.
It is vital that authors, illustrators, editors, publishers, and book industry professionals are transparent about their use of AI to maintain a sense of trust both within the creative community and with readers.
