The following Ethics Statement of Principles governing the use of AI in the company’s products and services was adopted by the Authors A.I. Board of Directors on March 14, 2025:
Ethics and Our Use of AI
Since our founding in 2020, Authors A.I. has been at the forefront of the AI revolution in the publishing world. Our AI algorithm is designed to respect copyright laws and protect intellectual property.
Our approach
We began building Marlowe, our main AI product, years before ChatGPT arrived on the scene. Our AI analyses help:
- Authors, editors, and publishers improve a book’s market potential through editorial-level feedback
- Readers discover new books based on subject matter or writing style
Our commitments
In developing Marlowe, our team of data scientists and authors have developed advanced in-house machine-learning techniques that include no generative capabilities. We commit to the following:
- We include only rights-cleared books in our corpus of bestsellers.
- We do not make licensed books available for purchase or reuse.
- Our Author Dashboard allows comparison against bestsellers while adhering to copyright laws, and it limits any excerpts to short snippets.
- We protect all data with advanced encryption and security measures.
- It’s impossible to reverse-engineer our reports to reproduce any analyzed work.
- We don’t retain manuscripts that are uploaded — only the resulting reports.
- Manuscripts uploaded to our system are never used for AI training.
- We never analyze manuscripts using a partner AI unless we have the consent of the author.
- We do not support AI systems that write books or portions of books using generative AI.
On generative AI
Our extended team includes more than 100 bestselling authors, and we strongly believe that authors must remain central to the creative process. The emergence of AI tools that can create entire novels presents new ethical challenges.
We recognize that authors use AI in different ways — some for feedback, others for research, outlines, scene prompts, or even writing portions of books. We don’t judge these choices but believe authors who extensively use AI for writing should disclose this to readers, who are asking for this level of transparency.
Further, it’s important for authors to know that the U.S. Copyright Office ruled in January 2025 that the AI-written portion of books do not qualify for copyright protection. The 52-page report determined that copyright protection requires meaningful human authorship and creativity, not just AI generation. Works that combine human-authored elements with AI-generated content are eligible for copyright protection but only for the human-created portions.
Looking ahead
Authors A.I. supports the responsible use of generative AI and may incorporate aspects of partner AI outputs in future offerings — though only to provide more tailored analytical feedback, not to generate passages for use in novels.
From the outset, the founders of Authors A.I. have spoken out against misuses of AI by those who seek to plagiarize the works of successful novelists (a situation that predates AI by hundreds of years). And we support compensating creators whose works inform AI systems.
During these early days, we think it’s reasonable for authors and businesses to use these groundbreaking AI technologies for analytical and research purposes. Indeed, most authors we know are already using AI to research aspects of their novels. We hope authors and readers will appreciate the nuances in the field and understand that some uses of AI are not only appropriate but are becoming the norm.
As our tools expand into additional creative corners, we will remain vigilant about potential misuses of A.I, rigorous in our security protocols, and proactive in providing assistive AI technologies that adhere to the highest legal and ethical standards. We believe AI models can amplify human creativity and benefit the publishing industry if used responsibly.
* Our analytical AI methodology focuses on how fiction books compare and relate to each other. This enables Marlowe to determine which elements or storytelling techniques go into a bestseller. Marlowe doesn’t “learn” how to write from reading manuscripts; rather, it learns how to make better comparisons among books.