Canada is Backing Human Authors

Recently, Canada changed their rules regarding their ISBNs. For the foreseeable future, Canadian ISBNs are restricted to human-generated content. The original version of the policy explicitly said that you may not use AI to generate the text, create the artwork, or translate the book. This has changed, but it is clear that ISBN Canada does not support AI-generated works at the expense of human creators.

In my opinion, this is fantastic news for authors, graphic designers, audiobook narrators, and translators. We are now seeing a government recognizing that there is a problem (that is negatively impacting on the industry as a whole), and they are telling publishers to sort their shit out.

Even though policing is going to be an issue, I hope other countries follow suit.

Stick around and I'll explain why I support this move by the Canadian government and what I hope this means for the publishing industry.

The Policy Itself

Before I get too carried away, let's quickly talk about the policy itself and the direct implications of it.

If you go to the Canadian government website and look at the pages on ISBNs, you will see the following note:

By registering with ISBN Canada, you declare that your publication was written by a human author. You may use AI tools only for limited support tasks, such as brainstorming ideas, checking grammar, or formatting your book. ISBN Canada limits the quantity of ISBNs for works whose content is primarily generated by AI (text, illustration, translation). LAC is currently reviewing its policy regarding the use of AI content creation and our guidance is subject to change.

At its essence, this statement is saying that ISBNs from Canada should be granted to human-generated works. There are some circumstances where AI-assisted works will also be granted ISBNs from Canada, but it's on a limited basis and certainly not open season. But it doesn't ban the use of AI technology from the publication process entirely.

If a writer used AI-generative technology to assist with research, prompt generation, outlining a story, or basic copyediting, but the words on the page were written by the human, then the story was human-generated.

If you are using AI to edit a story, the classification of human-authored will depend on how heavy a hand the AI had when editing. If the final version resembles the original human-generated version, then there is no issue. If AI was used to assist with basic grammar and spellchecking, no issue. If significant rewriting of passages was performed by the AI, then you have an issue.

If your cover or internal artwork was AI-generated, then it shouldn't be used on a Canadian book and have a Canadian ISBN. (Effectively, your entire book gets flagged as AI-generated at this point.)

AI-generated translations are frowned upon.

And while the policy says nothing about AI-generated audiobooks, audiobooks also require an ISBN. So, if Canadian ISBNs are limited for works whose content is primarily generated by AI, one has to assume that this applies to audiobooks too.

However, you can use AI to format (i.e. typeset) your books. Typesetting is a specific process that layouts a book for the printer (or the ebook reader). There is a lot of coding that goes into it to ensure that everything renders correctly in the final files, and it goes beyond using the right style codes on your manuscript headers and text body. For print, you have widows and orphans to think about, along with all the rules surrounding hyphenation. For ebooks, there's special tricks that you need to play to ensure that certain phrases aren't broken up across multiple lines. And you need to consider ALT text in ebooks too. Giving these fiddly tasks (which are rule-based) to an AI system makes sense. That said, I prefer to do my typesetting manually, because I'm that kind of control freak—but I also have the skills and the coding background to do it manually too.

Now, I don't live in Canada or have any Canadian business operations, so I don't qualify for Canadian ISBNs anyway. However, if my home country of New Zealand was to bring in a policy similar to this, I would be 100% fine, because I chose to avoid AI-generative technology in my creative process from the beginning.

This Policy Creates Certainty

Some of the complaints that I've seen regarding the tsunami of AI books actually surrounds uncertainty. Are we reading something created by a human? And as the AI-generative technology gets better, it's getting harder and harder to tell.

There are going to be people out there who will profess up and down that they can tell if a passage is AI-generated or not, but every time another list of AI tells is released, the AI programs take another leap and start doing something else. Instead, we humans are forced to start lowering our standards, stop using certain literary devices that have been around for centuries, all in the effort to look human—something that I refuse to do, because I have standards!

Yes, there are a lot of comments about AI slop. You will get no arguments from me on this. However, in all fairness, there is a lot of human-generated slop too. We seem to be a society who is so willing to blame bad writing on AI algorithms when it might have in fact been a new writer who was still learning their craft (and published before they should have).

But having an entire country that is restricting ISBNs to human-generated content only means that we can know with certainty that anything we purchase from a Canadian publisher was human authored. That doesn't mean that it is quality writing, because it could be human-generated slop, but at least we know it's human.

But They Can Get ISBNs Elsewhere

Within one of my writing communities, we've been discussing this news, and yes, we can see issues with it.

As it stands now, this only impacts those publishing using Canadian ISBNs. At the time of writing this post, ISBNs worldwide are not impacted and are still issued to AI-generated works. This includes the free ISBNs from Amazon and Draft2Digital. But I can see this changing in the future. I would like to think that other countries (including New Zealand) would take their heads out of the sand and take notice, perhaps follow suit.

Will this stop the publication of AI-generated works? No. Even if the Big Zon (i.e., Amazon) elected to stop publishing AI works, there would always be a portal through which those publishing AI-generated stories would be able to distribute to the public, even if it's via their own website.

Will ISBN policies of this nature mean that bookstores and retailers stop stocking AI-generated works? Maybe, primarily because those producing AI-generated books will have more hoops to jump through to reach certain distribution portals.

My Personal Views on AI Within Creative Arts

I need to start by saying that I'm not anti-AI. I'm not pro-AI either. I'm pro-writer. And I will always support human writers.

While I'm not Catholic, I agree with Pope Leo when he said that we need to distinguish between human art and what is produced by machines.

"There is an ontological difference—even before an aesthetic one—between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of the human, whereas 'authentic culture and art preserve this spark.'"
Read the full article from CBCP News.

For writing specifically, I feel that it's important for a writer to take the time to learn their craft and to not miss any part of the process when it comes to producing stories to be published.

I believe that there is a HUGE difference between a "self-published book" and a "quality book that just happens to be self-published". And it all comes down to our standards and whether we're skipping vital steps in the process.

In my opinion, using AI to write the story for you is skipping vital steps in the process.

A writer can take years to learn their craft. They develop a voice through trial and error. They learn how a simple wording change can influence the cadence of a passage, ultimately impacting on the reader experience. They learn how to influence emotions through their words. They learn how to connect with their readers in a visceral way.

Getting another entity (human or computer) to write a passage for you means that you aren't learning those skills necessary to take a story to market. You're farming it out and slapping your name on someone else's work.

(FYI, I'm also not a fan of those "writers" who used ghostwriters to write their work and claimed it as their own.)

I want to support those who want to learn for themselves how to take that idea floating around in their head and turn it into something that will ultimately be read by others (in a publishable state). I don't want to "teach" shortcuts, because anything truly worth having doesn't come with shortcuts—it comes with hard work.

If someone wants to use AI to write their stories for them, I'm not going to get in their way. But I'm not their audience either. And if they encounter roadblocks because they want to take a shortcut to the glory road that doesn't really exist, then so be it. They have to face the consequences of their actions.

The community as a whole is really pushing back on AI-generated creative works, and personally, I'm pleased to see this change.

I don't want to be the one who stands in the way of any writer from writing their stories. But I also want those who are using AI to write their stories for them to understand the depth of the situation.

Not everyone was meant to be a writer who becomes published. The only ones who should make it to that point need to be stubborn and pig-headed enough that they don't let anyone or anything stand in their way. They need to have a persistence as they continue to learn their craft through trial and error. They have to believe in their work so strongly that they're willing to stake their reputation on it.

Witi Ihimaera, one of New Zealand's cherished writers (with over 50 years in the industry), once said to a room filled with writers that "you need to stand up for your books and you need to stand before your books." I took this to mean that we need to be our books' greatest champion, believing in them when no one else will. And we need to be willing to defend our voice with every last ounce of our beings.

If anyone who has used AI to write their books for them can stand up in front of a room filled with writers and say with their hand over their heart that they are "proud of the story that AI wrote for them" and are willing to champion that book knowing that they will be ridiculed for it, then okay, I will be happy to see you as a fellow writer. But don't expect me to support your choices and don't expect me to become a fan, because I won't.

I'm a writer who supports human creatives. I'm a writer who fights to have the human recognized.