How to Protect Your IP from AI

When my wife and I were on holiday earlier this year, I received a message via this site (thank you, messaging person) saying 'You may want to look at this.'

This was linked to a Reddit post.

The Reddit thread, which can still be seen although the top post has been removed, drew attention to my Goodreads page, which included about seventy books I hadn't written.

It turns out that this merging of authors' books is incredibly common on the Goodreads site, and decoupling them is a full-time job in itself. I'm grateful to the moderators who do it, but in the meantime I was being dogpiled on the internet for 'using AI.'

I don't use AI for writing or editing. It's not just that my five books were published before 2023, which they were. I just don't use it.

After a Kafkaesque couple of days, the post was taken down. It could have been worse, and I don't have an easy answer for any other authors dealing with this, but here are a few tips to keep you sane and safe online:

1. Keep an eye on profiles and websites that mention you, even if you're not a fan of the sites themselves, and check them every couple of weeks. If something looks odd, don't assume it will sort itself out; reach out to the site moderators

2. Set up a Google Alert with your name so that things like this reach you in good time

3. Don't wait to speak out; get support from the people around you, leverage personal relationships with those who know you and will vouch for you as an authentic creator

4. Keep a consistent personal brand across social media, so people will be more able to spot when something looks off

5. Keep your publishing contracts, if you have them, somewhere you can easily access them and let them know this is happening if it affects them at all (your publicist and/or editors may not be able to do anything in response, but it may help them to know that you haven't just lost the plot and written two hundred books about dolphins or whatever)

Those five books are mine - books I lost sleep over, that I got up at four a.m. to work on, that I danced with my family to celebrate their launches. If anyone thinks I'm handing any of that over to AI, they are wildly mistaken. I also don't use it in my editing - as Tony Soprano said, 'In this house, it's 1954.' The editors of 1954 knew what they were doing without AI, and so do I.

I wish you all a happy and slop-free holiday season and New Year.