A publisher creates a label to guarantee that a book was written by a human

The self-publishing house Librinova has joined forces with the company Création humaine to guarantee consumers that a book has not been produced by artificial intelligence.

Librinova, a publisher that allows self-publishing, announced Monday January 8 that it had joined forces with the Création humaine label, a company launched in 2023 to certify that a work (written, audiovisual or musical) was indeed the product of a brain human. This service, first offered to Librinova authors from mid-January, and which seeks to attract other publishers, will allow the label to be affixed to the cover of a book if the author wishes.

To be certified “AI-free”, a book must meet several criteria. The author must first give “a contractual commitment in which he certifies that his creation was entirely designed, developed and produced by human means”Charlotte Allibert, co-founder of Librinova, explains to franceinfo.

The text will also be passed through an AI-generated text “detector”, and the author will be “interviewed” by a professional auditor, who will also read samples of the text. “None of these steps alone would make it possible to label the work, but it is their association which makes the label safe and credible”estimates Charlotte Allibert with franceinfo.

Serious factual errors

More and more self-published books, particularly on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform, are written by generative artificial intelligence software. Librinova and Human Creation believe that they are “several thousands” In France. Written in record time, they often suffer from serious factual errors, as generative AI can make.

The family of Léon Gautier, a Frenchman who participated in the Landing of June 6, 1944, denounced in December a biography published on Amazon by a certain “Grace Shaw”, full of untruths. Published two days after the death of this hero of the Liberation, in July 2023, it affirmed, among other things, that he had been a prisoner in Germany. Other titles are causing dissatisfaction among Amazon customers. A buyer of Stoicism: the 10 secrets of ancient spirituality to better live modern lifeby a certain “Aurèle Martin”, shows a page containing a false quotation from Marcus Aurelius, this Roman emperor exhorting to “cultivate a healthy relationship with screens”.

Librinova is one of the most prolific publishers in France, with 9,000 titles since its creation in 2014. Authors pay to be published, with the advantage that they then receive a significant share of the sale price (70%) , without however benefiting from the visibility of a traditional publisher.