The Ethical and legal considerations of writing with AI assistance are a mine field. Here are some tips to help keep you on the right path, but please always check for the most uptodate advice, we are in a rapid period of transition right now.
Respect copyright and licensing
Choose AI tools that state clearly what training data they use and what rights they claim over user content. Prefer services that explicitly say you retain ownership of what you upload. Plus that they will not use your text to train models without consent. When a tool offers paid or enterprise tiers labeled non‑training or private, read the contractual language. This will confirm their limits on reuse, sublicensing, and commercialisation. Keep a dated local backup of drafts and snapshots of the tool’s Terms of Service. Important: at the time you uploaded material, so you can prove provenance if needed.
Be transparent with collaborators
Before work begins, document how AI will be used across drafting, editing, and marketing stages and get written agreement from all coauthors and contributors. Specify whether AI assists only with mechanical edits or whether it will generate creative passages, and agree how that affects authorship credit, copyright ownership, and royalties. Set boundaries for what each collaborator may upload to third‑party tools and create a shared folder or log that records AI prompts, outputs used, and who approved them. Revisit and update the agreement at major milestones such as first draft completion, agent submission, or contract offers.
Protect privacy
Treat unpublished manuscripts, private correspondence, and third‑party source material as sensitive data and avoid pasting them into free or unclear AI services. Use tools that guarantee data isolation or choose local/offline models for anything you cannot risk being stored or reused. When you must share private material with editors, beta readers, or sensitivity readers, get explicit consent that they will not feed the text into external AI services and ask them to confirm deletion after review. Anonymize or redact identifying details when you need remote help on vulnerable or legally sensitive scenes.
Credit human contributors
Acknowledge editors, line editors, developmental editors, sensitivity readers, fact‑checkers. Basically, any collaborator whose input materially shaped the manuscript. State in your acknowledgements or contributor notes what role each person played, and be transparent about where AI tools were used and for what purpose. If contributors worked under contract, ensure payment and credit terms reflect the scope of their work and whether they used AI tools themselves. Treat human labor as irreplaceable expertise and compensate or credit it accordingly rather than substituting AI for professional judgment.
Basic takeaways
Use AI to augment creative work, not to replace the author’s judgment, voice, or ethical responsibility. Check out my other articles about legal rights and AI use.
About the Author
As an introvert haunting the corners of storytelling festivals, it’s incredibly difficult to track Emma down. She’s best known for writing Scottish fiction about working-class women and communities and their misrepresented lives. You can find her recent book The Secret Cult of the Miners’ Library here. Or get writing help here.
0 Comments