Albert Einstein famously said that “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
For many of us, our imaginations began to develop in early childhood; perhaps while sitting on a loving grandparent’s lap while they told you stories of their childhood. Or maybe it was each night when our parents would tuck us into bed and settle us to sleep with a bedtime story.
Many children took these precious tales and let their imagination run wild, expressing their thoughts through drawing pictures, playing games and into their dreams of their future.
The stories told fuelled creativity, expanding the limits of what we thought was possible, because they were told to us by someone we trusted.
As we grew older, libraries and bookshops became our gateways to learning more about ourselves and the world around us.
We found aisles of voices, with differing narratives that exposed us to another human’s lived experience. Even in fantasy books, in worlds where wizards cast spells and brave knights saved the day, we lost hours in the words that were created by an author’s imagination.
We never questioned the origin of our beloved stories. Each book we picked up was assumed to be the product of the author’s name on the cover; the hard workings of a writer who spent years developing their characters, wrestling with different drafts, and thinking deeply about each and every word on the page.
Today that assumption is no longer guaranteed.
Platforms such as Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing now release more than 1.4 million self-published titles every year, and with the development of generative artificial intelligence tools making it possible to produce entire books in minutes, a growing proportion of these titles are now being created by AI.
Many of the books we now see online, look convincingly the same as the novels we grew up reading in paperback. Much like the hardcopies sitting on your bedside tables, these creations have professional covers, author biographies and even ‘author’ acknowledgements or forewords.
At first glance, it’s almost impossible for readers to distinguish between the work of a human writer, and the results of a well-crafted machine prompt. The result is a marketplace where readers often have no clear way of knowing whether a book was written by a human or produced by a machine.
What People Mean By “AI Slop”
“AI slop” has become the internet’s latest buzzword to describe the influx of low-effort, machine-generated, synthetic content that’s been spreading online at such a rapid rate.
You see it everywhere, from social media feeds, product reviews, websites and even in the news articles we read online each day.
In almost any forum where large volumes of digital content can be generated and uploaded in seconds, we’ll find an abundance of machine-generated material that’s fast overtaking the spaces that were once dominated by human creatives.
The writing and publishing industry is now confronting this same phenomenon, and with ai-generated books, or ‘AI slop’ multiplying across digital marketplaces, there is a widening debate about authorship transparency.
The questions at the forefront of the minds of both publishers and consumers is: how do we prove if a story was genuinely written by a human, and how do we tell the difference?
AI detection tools attempted to solve this problem by trying to identify AI-generated text.
However, many of these quick-to-market systems proved unreliable, and many human writers, took issue with their human-created works being fed into the software. Concerns were raised about their original content potentially becoming part of the data used to further train and refine AI systems.
Therefore, if detecting AI in writing isn’t the answer, then perhaps we need to ask the question: Can we prove this was written by a human?
In other words, the future of authenticity may not come from detecting machines, but instead from certifying humans.
From Suspicion to Certification
Human authors often spend years working on their books. These creatives pour years of lived experiences and personal life lessons into their narratives, with each piece of writing representing their imagination and emotions.
And despite the rapid uptake in AI among the general public, publishers, writers and readers continue to place value in the authenticity of human creativity and storytelling.
For most of history, people could safely assume that anything they read was written by a human. Unfortunately, that default assumption is now gone. The result is now, human creators are facing increased pressure to prove that their work in genuinely human.
Readers deserve the right to choose if what they are reading reflects the real human perspective or if the content was assembled by a piece of software that has no ability to think or feel.
Can you imagine a future where all content created now, was machine-generated? How will future writers, journalists, teachers, or even our children, have any record that explains what life was like when AI was first introduced?
If human created work is not celebrated and preserved now, we run the risk of a future where nothing created by humans is valued.
Proudly Human, is an international certification body dedicated to verifying and labelling human-created content. They were founded on this exact mission, to give audiences a way to clearly distinguish between work created by human authors and content generated by artificial intelligence.
The organization fundamentally believes that there is still something uniquely valuable about a piece of writing that begins and ends in a human brain. Moreover, this creativity deserves to be visible and celebrated.
Recognizing that AI-generated books can, and are, masquerading as human-authored, Proudly Human believes that without a trust signal that tells readers a book is human-authored, they are denied the information they deserve to make an informed choice.
Proudly Human has developed a verification system that certifies creative work across multiple creative industries, when the work meets a clear standard of human authorship.
When creatives voluntarily apply to have their work certified, once approved, their work can carry the ProudlyHuman™ certification mark that signals its verification of human origin. What this means is that any creator can proudly stand by their work, and audiences can make informed decisions in choosing to support creativity that’s human-made.
The ProudlyHuman™ certification mark functions much like an “organic” label in food: it’s not a judgment on other products, but instead, it’s a visible signal that the words, art or music in front of them carry lived experience, accountability, and intention.
Why Certification Matters for Publishers and Authors
With so much ‘AI slop’ appearing across the creative ecosystem, there is increased trepedaciousness among consumers who held value in purchasing books from various online marketplaces.
Human authors, particularly self-published human authors, traditionally relied upon these online marketplaces as a way to get discovered and share their work. With AI usage becoming the faithful sidekick of any would-be author, there have been massive increases in manuscript submissions, which have become a challenging issue for readers who have unknowingly supported AI-generated work.
Many readers have developed a growing distrust to online listings that are populating platforms with low-quality titles. Clearly signalling human authorship restores the agency that has come into question due to AI usage spreading across creative industries.
It’s not just an issue for the human authors. Publishers are increasingly under scrutiny for also being unable to distinguish between human created content and machine outputs. In recent news, the novel Shy Girl had to be removed from publication, due to the book suspected of being largely AI generated.
While the author denied using AI to write the book, and explained that she’d outsourced the editing process, the damage was done.
If certifying human authorship were to become standard practice, publishers would be able to to provide a trust signal to their audiences, that would reinforce their strict editorial standards and display their commitment to supporting authentic human storytelling.
For human authors who pour their heart and souls into their work, it’s beyond discouraging to have to compete against thousands of AI-generated creations.
The ProudlyHuman™ certification offers a different path forward for both publishers and authors. Instead of trying to compete with AI-automated volumes of writing, human authors can showcase what machines cannot imitate: the originality of genuine human creation.
A Future Where Readers Can Choose
Whether we like it or not, AI systems are here to stay. The use of AI tools will continue to influence all industries, in both positive and negative ways.
Some authors might choose to utilize these systems as productivity tools for checking errors in spelling and grammar. Some will use AI to draft outlines and to research sources to back up important claims. And then there will be others, who will prefer to maintain their traditional writing processes of putting pen to paper.
Proudly Human as an organization is not anti-AI. The mission is not to ban AI use or to restrict anyone’s experimentation with any new tool or technology.
What matters most is transparency.
If a reader chooses to support a novel written by AI, a human-authored opus, or even a mixture of both, what matters is that the reader gets the ability to choose what they want to support.
When any creative work carries the ProudlyHuman™ certification trust mark, it helps make that choice possible by clearly signalling when a work has been verified as human-authored.
If our love of stories and reading began when we were young and was built by human imagination we owe it to ourselves to celebrate the creators whose life’s work is to create this magic.
Those tales our grandparents told us, the bedtime stories we fell asleep reading, and the storytelling that sparked our imaginations deserve to preserved.
By making human authorship visible, the ProudlyHuman™ trust mark gives writers the recognition they deserve and readers confidence in the origin of the words they are reading.
Because after all, when readers open a book, they deserve to know that behind the words on the page is what has always made storytelling powerful: a human mind that imagined them first.
Learn More:
Supporting Human Creativity: How Readers Can Tell Human Writing from AI Content
How ProudlyHuman™ Verifies Human-Authored Content in an AI Writing World