The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) recognizes that AI tools offer functionality that can be useful to self-publishing authors in their creative and business practices. We recognise also that there are significant ethical issues around the use of generative AI tools and the training of AI models. This is our association's ethical and practical guidelines to AI for authors.

Indie authors have a different relationship with AI from authors who are just writing. We are also publishing our books, packaging them, pricing them, distributing them, licensing them, and bringing them to readers.

That means our AI questions are broader: ‘What does it mean if I use AI in my manuscript?’ but also ‘How effective is AI for handling my metadata, translations, audio, ads, blurbs, covers?’

ALLi is a broad church and we acknowledge that AI can be a divisive topic. We know authors take very different viewpoints and perspectives on AI. Our members and followers span the gamut and our aim is to create a climate of respect and inclusivity in the self-publishing author community, while upholding ethics in relation to the rights of human creators, particularly around copyright, IP, accountability and transparency.

ALLi’s AI policy distinguishes between the responsibilities of AI developers and authors. Our concern throughout is to ensure that human authorship and creativity are respected and remain central.

Our position is neither blanket endorsement nor blanket rejection. Ideas around how AI will impact authors range from apocalyptic to utopian, and as with most new technological breakthroughs, the reality will likely fall between these extremes.

ALLi's policy is to encourage the best options, campaign against the worst, and support our author members in making informed decisions. We argue that AI developers owe authors clarity, consent, and compensation, while indie authors owe readers creativity, curiosity, and responsibility.

This is an information guide, not legal advice. It is regularly updated but be aware that the law is changing quickly.

AI in Publishing: Three Author Archetypes

At ALLi we use three broad author archetypes to discuss AI policies and ethics. Most authors will find that one of three archetypes fits their current practice — or that they sit somewhere between two of them.

AI-Minimal: Authors who try not to use generative AI in their creative or publishing work, or who limit AI use to basic tools already embedded in standard software.

AI-Assisted: Authors who use AI as a tool at specific stages of their process — in research, brainstorming, editing, or business tasks — but not to generate the prose, poetry, or creative content of their books.

AI-Integrated: Authors who use AI across multiple aspects of their creative and publishing process, including the generation of text in books.

All three positions are legitimate. All three are compatible with ethical authorship — provided that the core principle of accountability is met: that you know what you are doing, have made an informed choice, and take responsibility for what you write and publish.

The AI-minimal author who has made a principled choice to keep AI out of her creative process deserves to be able to say so clearly, without being made to feel like a luddite. Equally, the AI-integrated author who uses AI at every stage of his workflow deserves to be able to describe that without apology, and with the same pride in his craft. And the middling author —the author who uses AI for her blurbs and her brainstorming but writes every word of her novels herself—should have the space to reflects their nuances accurately.

AI Policy for Authors

We encourage all authors to have their own AI policy–a clear and honest statement of how they engage with artificial intelligence in their writing and publishing business–and to publish it prominently on their website.

This matters more now than ever before. A well-crafted AI policy on an author website is increasingly a trust signal—a way of saying: ‘I know what I am doing, I am transparent about it, and I respect you enough to tell you.'

We provide a guide to developing an AI policy (three archetypes) for our members.

ALLi Ethical & Practical Guidelines 

For indie authors, the question is not simply whether AI should be used, but how it can be used in ways that respect creativity, protect rights, and sustain trust between authors, publishers, platforms, and readers. To help guide that conversation, ALLi has identified six core principles for ethical and effective AI engagement:

AI Developers

• Clarity
• Consent
• Compensation

Authors

• Curiosity
• Creativity

All

• Accountability

Taken together, these principles offer a practical framework for authors, publishers, and technology companies alike. They recognise both the possibilities and the risks of AI, while insisting that innovation must not come at the expense of human creators. Adhering to them would help build a publishing environment that is ethical, honest, and fully aware of its enduring debt to human imagination and creative labour.

AI Developer Responsibilities

• Clarity: AI developers must provide transparency about how their models are trained, including what data sources are used and under what terms. This openness allows creators and users to make informed decisions about the technologies they engage with.
• Consent: Developers must establish clear and accessible systems for obtaining creators’ consent before using their work in AI training datasets. This includes providing meaningful opt-in or opt-out mechanisms and respecting creators’ choices.
• Compensation: Developers must put in place fair, standardized processes to compensate creators whose work contributes to AI training or whose intellectual property informs AI-generated outputs.

Author Considerations

• Curiosity: An uninformed decision is not an empowered decision. Even if you feel uncertain or cautious about AI in the creative space, we encourage indie authors to approach it with curiosity; not to adopt it uncritically, but to understand how it works, what it offers, and where its limits lie, so you can make informed choices that align with your own values and practice.
• Creativity: We encourage authors to approach AI as a tool that supports rather than replaces their unique creative vision and voice and that values the integrity of human authorship .

 Accountability for All

• Accountability: Writers and all individuals and organisations are responsible for ensuring that the content they publish, regardless of the tools used in its creation, is accurate, appropriate, and aligned with their creative intent and editorial standards are maintained.

ALLi’s Actions

ALLi has a broad membership with vastly different opinions and approaches to AI. We encourage our members to have an AI policy on their websites, which readers who are interested can consult.

Members can find a guide to Developing Your AI Policy in the member website (log-in needed). This provides key questions to address and sample wording for each of the three archetypes (Minimal, Assisted, or Integrated) plus a section on protecting your work from AI training, if that's important to you, and the copyright, disclosure and platform requirements you're likely to meet.

To support authors in navigating the AI landscape, ALLi also commits to the following:

• Provide the latest news and information to its author members and followers of The Self-Publishing Advice Center, to enable them to make informed decisions and to ensure they are not left behind in the use of beneficial tools.
• Raise issues concerning, and advocate against, unethical use of AI.
• Campaign for proactive and positive legal and ethical frameworks to be put in place.
• Support industry-wide efforts promoting transparency, advocating ethical and legal steps for our industry and community.
• Lobby for greater clarity and accountability from AI companies
• Revisit our guidelines and policies on this topic frequently and update them as needed.

Often, actions undertaken by organizations can be more effective than actions undertaken by individuals, and we encourage authors to engage with ALLi on topics related to AI.

For more information about ALLi’s practical and ethical perspectives on these topics:

• • AI-related blog posts – Check our most recent blog posts for snapshot-in-time content related to AI.
  • Guidelines for Authors to Create Their Own AI Policy – A Member resource to guide authors through the process of creating a policy based on their own stance on AI.

ALLi Team Use of AI

ALLi Team members make use of AI tools for their ALLi work for these purposes:

• Editing and correction of errors
• First draft short documents, e.g. emails, press releases, event descriptions, podcast blurbs
• Ideation, discussion and further development
• AI functionality built into tools used by the AI team (e.g., Canva’s Magic Studio, ProWritingAid, and Grammarly for editing, etc.

Ethical Author Program

As part of our ethical self-publishing campaign, the Alliance of Independent Authors runs an ethical author program. This program provides a code of conduct for authors to follow in relation to author ethics. The code is voluntary and is additional to the required Code of Standards signed up to by ALLi members. Any author, regardless of publication method or membership, can sign up to this code, once they agree to the guiding principles.

The ethical author code has for some years included a clause related to AI:

I declare use of AI and other tools where appropriate. I edit and curate the output of any generative text tool I use to ensure the text is not discriminatory, libelous, an infringement of copyright, or otherwise illegal or illicit. I recognize that it is my job, not the job of the AI tool or service I use, to ensure I am legally compliant. 

ALLi’s Answers to Your AI FAQs

Does using AI jeopardise my copyright?

No so long as you retain authorship. Asking a tool to help you think, or edit words, is not the same as handing over authorship.

Under US law, with others expected to follow suit, human authors can claim copyright in their own expression, in creative modifications they make to AI output, and in their creative selection or arrangement of material. But wholly AI-generated text is not copyrightable.

Copyright law centres human authorship. If you use AI for brainstorming, research, outlining, or editing support, this does not affect the copyright in your human-written work. The real danger lies in over-reliance on machine-generated expression that you have not substantially transformed into something genuinely your own.

Prompting alone is not enough. Even elaborate prompting does not itself amount to authorship in the legal sense. Tools can assist but authorship remains a human responsibility.

What about covers, translation, and audio?

AI can lower the cost of translation, audio production, and cover development and this can open real opportunities, especially for authors earlier in their careers or working with limited budgets. AI narration may make audiobooks financially possible. AI-assisted translation may help authors explore new markets. Prompt-based imagery may help create mood boards or initial concepts for cover designers.

Wholly AI-generated cover art, AI-generated translation are not copyrightable. Notes also that some prizes, awards, and reader communities may exclude books that use AI in the text or even on the cover.

Will AI make writers defunct?

We don't believe so. Humans have agency and intelligence, which, despite its name, AI does not. Humans are driven to create, and want to connect with other humans. AI tools won’t change those fundamental drives, but it is already changes how different kinds of writing and writers are valued, how publishing platforms provide services, and how indie authors, who are both writers and publishers, do their jobs.

AI tools are being used by creators to help bring their ideas to fruition, often cutting out the most tedious parts of the job or allowing for more creative solutions.

Will AI Saturate the Market?

Yes but the market is already saturated and has been for years. Yet the publishing industry, both trade and indie sectors, persist. AI tools with increasingly sophisticated recommendation algorithms can aid book discoverability.

Some readers care more about AI-assisted or generated content than others. Some love to make choices that support human creators, others are only interested in the reading experience. Each author-publisher needs to understand their own readership and how that fits with their own principles.

The publishing future, like the publishing past, belongs to those who can engage readers and stand out with a unique and identifiable voice—not to those pushing cookie-cutter prose or productivity models.

What are examples of using AI unethically as an author?

Some examples might be:

• Misrepresenting authorship to readers or collaborators: Copying and pasting AI-generated content without reviewing, adapting, meaningfully shaping and editing. Claiming a book, article, or submission was written entirely by a human when AI played a substantial role.

• Poor editorial checks: Publishing AI-assisted content without verifying facts, quotations, or sources.

• Copying other author's style: Relying on AI outputs that closely mimic the voice, structure, or distinctive style of a living author or specific copyrighted work.

Should I declare my use of AI tools?

While authors are not legally required to declare the use of AI in their works, we encourage transparency regarding AI use. This recommendation aligns with ALLi's broader commitment to ethical publishing practices. Amazon KDP and other platforms ask authors to indicate whether any part of their book was generated by AI when they upload their manuscripts. This includes text and images and requires authors to disclose whether their content is AI-generated or AI-assisted.

The disclosure is intended to help platforms manage the quality and originality of the content available on its platform, as well as to address potential legal issues related to copyright and intellectual property.

If you use text generated by an AI tool, run the final work through a plagiarism checker to ensure you have not unwittingly infringed someone's copyright. ProWritingAid and Grammarly both have plagiarism checkers.

Even where the law does not require transparency, ethics often do. That does not mean every use of an AI tool needs a label on the copyright page. It does mean indie authors should stop thinking of transparency as optional and start seeing it as part of professional publishing practice.

Can AI companies train on copyrighted books without permission?

This  is still not settled, as early U.S. rulings have gone in different ways. Training on legally acquired books has been found to be fair use in at least one federal court, while other aspects of AI companies’ conduct, such as using pirated books for training, have been treated differently. These are early rulings, not the final word. ALLi is working with other author organisations to push for clarity, consent and compensation for authors.

How can I set my work apart from AI-generated work?

There is one thing that AI, and indeed other authors, can never do: be you. Specialize in giving your writing your particular stamp. In your writing, communicate from your deepest experience, using your own voice, telling your own truths. In your publishing, focus on local, imperfect, real connections with other human beings: your readers and the authors in your niche whose work you most admire. Think about incorporating audio and video, where you cannot help but reveal yourself, into your marketing.

However you do it, be personal, be honest, be authentically you. Personality, values, personal branding: these become ever more key, as does true human connection with your readers.

Resources

The AI landscape is changing week-by-week, and sometimes day-by-day, and this is your source for the latest information ALLi has to share on this topic, as well as educational resources to spur your curiosity about this new tool. You’ll find more information at our Self-Publishing Advice Center, which now includes a distinct AI category.

AI for Indie Authors: A Practical Resource List

The AI conversation is noisy, polarised, and moving fast. Here are a variety of resources that range from AI positive, to curious, to sceptical.  Listen with an open mind then find your own true place.

AI For Authors

• ALLi: AI for Authors — Ethical & Practical Guidelines
• ALLi: AI, Tools & Tech archive
• Future of Fiction Academy
• Steph Pajonas Writes About AI and Authorship
• The Creative Penn: The AI-Assisted Artisan Author
• Writer Beware
• Indie Author Magazine

AI for Society & Culture

Websites

• AI as Normal Technology
• AI Now Institute
• Computer Says Maybe
• Data & Society: AI library
• Hard Fork
• One Useful Thing 
• Rest of World: Tech & Innovation
• Reuters Institute: AI and the Future of News
• Tech Policy Press
• Tech Won’t Save Us

Books

• Davenport, Thomas and and Kirby, Julia. Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
• Mims, Christopher. How to AI 
• Lee, Kai-Fu: AI Superpowers and with Chen Qiufan, AI 2041 
• Mollick, Ethan. Co-Intelligence
• Penn, Joanna. Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and Virtual Worlds + Future of Creativity page
• Tegmark, Max. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence