Publishing has a new crime. The suspect is the author. The weapon is an AI audit. The motive is money. In the US this summer, a debut novel called Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, won a 14-way auction and a two-book deal with Minotaur, Macmillan’s crime imprint, reported at more than £1.5m.
Within weeks it was gone. The author’s agents pulled it, saying they could no longer “authenticate how the manuscript fully evolved from origin to completion”. The author denies writing it with AI. He has hired a lawyer.
Publishers are not thinking about art. They are protecting their assets. Europe is where it bites hardest. The UK is where it is still, for the moment at least, more fluid but not for much longer.
EU copyright law protects a work that is the “author’s own intellectual creation”. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) set that test in Infopaq and filled it out in Painer - free and creative choices, the author’s personal touch.
In Prague a court threw out a claim over an AI-generated image made from a short prompt. Its verdict: the image “cannot as a matter of principle be protected by copyright”.
So a book written by a machine is hard if not impossible to copyright. A publisher that cannot own those rights has nothing to sell.
Anyone could reprint it. No studio will option what it cannot lock down. No foreign publisher will pay for translation rights that may not exist.
That is the real reason manuscripts are now being run through AI detectors. It is a rights audit dressed up as a moral crusade.
The UK is the odd one out, at least on paper. Section 9(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act protects “computer-generated” work. The author is whoever made “the arrangements necessary” for it to be created. Protection lasts 50 years..
It sounds like a lifeline but the Court of Appeal has already adopted the European test of originality in THJ v Sheridan - free and creative choices again. No court has applied section 9(3) to generative AI.
In March the government proposed scrapping it, having seen no evidence it was worth keeping. I would not build a rights business on a clause the government wants to delete.
In 20 years building products in gambling, payments, media and government, I would never ship something we could not legally own. But that does not seem to apply to publishers.
On 9 October Wired reported that staff at the US arms of HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette use ChatGPT and Claude for back-cover copy, publicity and pitches. Image generators turn up in some cover art.
Now apply the European test. A cover made from a prompt is the Prague image with a barcode on the back. If no human made the creative choices, nobody owns it. A rival could lift it. A pirate could slap it on a knock-off edition and the publisher would have far less to fight with.
So the house rule runs like this. The author must prove every word is human or lose the deal. The publisher can put machine-made art on the front of the same book and call it operational.
That is the double-think.
The regulators will not fix it for us. The EU AI Act’s labelling rules came into force on 2 August. They target deepfakes and AI text published to inform the public on matters of public interest. Jacket copy on a novel falls outside. Authors face the detectors. Publishers face nothing.
Who carries the risk? The author, every time. Contracts make the writer warrant the work is original. If doubt appears, the advance goes back. Yet, detectors prove nothing. They just guess, with a percentage attached.
Note why the Prague claimant lost. He could not prove which prompt made the image or that he wrote it. In a European court, the evidence of how a work was made is everything.
When a payments firm is challenged, it produces the audit trail. Every change, every timestamp, every approver. Similarly so in betting or any one of a 100 other industries.
Provenance is designed in from day one because one day somebody will ask. So authors, freelancers, copywriters and journalists, take note.
Keep your drafts. Write in tools with version history. Keep your notes, your research and your editor’s marks. If you used AI for research, put it in writing before you sign anything.
Otherwise that big fat cheque could end up in the bin.