Food packaging style health warnings should be put on books written by AI, says Scotland's Makar

Food packaging-style health warnings should be put on books written by artificial intelligence (AI), Scotland's Makar has claimed.

Peter Mackay said he had “huge concerns” over the issues the publishing industry was facing over the use of AI and suggested measures need to be taken to inform the public about the level of AI-input in a book.

Mr Mackay suggested a new type of British Kitemark, or something akin to the Harris Tweed Orb - sewed in items made from tweed to show its provenance as having been handwoven and finished by people in the Western Isles - could also be used to show something is “100 per cent AI-free”.

He said the ideas had been discussed at a workshop for writers, publishers and academics he attended last year.

Scottish Makar Peter MacKay.

Speaking to the BBC, Mr Mackay, who became Makar, Scotland’s national poet, in December, said another option was that books created with the use of AI could include a breakdown of the sources of its style and sentence structure, similar to way additives are listed on cereal boxes.

"It might outline this is 1 per cent Vladimir Nabokov, 2 per cent Gertrude Stein," he said.

"One of the things that was discussed was a Harris Tweed Orb or Kitemark-style mark to say 100 per cent AI-free or 100 per cent organically produced.

"I have got huge concerns about AI in terms of the creation of new literature and creation of new books, partly because as a writer it could be disastrous for new people who are in the profession.

"It's very hard to make a living as a writer anyway and if you are having to compete with the cumulative knowledge of every book written before condensed into some form of conglomerate, that is very hard to do."

A judge of this year’s Highland Book Prize, Mr MacKay said competitions allowed books which were “odd” and the antithesis of AI-generated content.

"I think one of the things book prizes do is celebrate oddity, celebrate diversity, celebrate distinctive style, the kind of thing that AI doesn't do at the moment," he said.

"It is the odd turn of phrase rather than the expected turn of phrase and I would hope that book prizes are still able to do that. They offer a marker of really interesting, new, distinctive voices."

Mr Mackay added: "I dread the first time a prize is won by something that turns out to be AI-generated. Where would that leave the people who have been sitting for hours by themselves scribbling away having to compete with computer-generated poems, short stories and novels?"