BISG Shows How ONIX Can Flag AI Use and Human Authorship

What did BISG publish? On October 19, 2026, Graham Bell posted a Book Industry Study Group guide on how ONIX metadata can record that artificial intelligence helped make a book, and that it did not. More of the group's work is on our BISG page.

Bell writes that AI is controversial in publishing, and that the conversation is dominated by publishers' fears over unauthorized use of published content to train large language models, and by the threat to creators' livelihoods. He also writes that legitimate uses are increasingly common, especially for administrative and workflow tasks. He points to the survey AI use across the North American book industry 2026, from BISG and BookNet Canada. We covered it here: what the industry said it is using AI for. BookNet's side of the work is on our BookNet Canada page.

Almost 90 percent of respondents to that survey, he writes, mentioned worries about the accuracy of AI-generated content and about AI-generated books flooding retail sites. His examples are travel guides scraped automatically from Wikipedia, and low-effort genre novels created by, or with, an AI. Those books, he writes, crowd the market and hurt books by real people. Shops and publishers who want their own books set apart, he writes, should identify titles created or assisted by AI, and should say outright when a book had none. ONIX can carry both, which he says should help trust.

Listing AI as a contributor

ONIX treats AI as a contributor, through the UnnamedPersons tag. Bell notes that the same tag is already used for credits such as "Anonymous" or "et al."

His example is a book written in Spanish by Valeria Lucia Garcia Moreno and translated into English by AI. The author is contributor sequence 1, role A01 (written by), with her name. The translator is sequence 2, role B06 (translated by), with the source language coded as Spanish and UnnamedPersons set to 09, which the post annotates as generative AI. The language of the finished book would be listed elsewhere in the record.

Any role, including author, can be marked as AI, he writes, and it can be useful to say that a human creator used AI assistance. He then names the reason a publisher may not bother. There is little incentive to add the flag on your own, because it may compromise copyrightability in the United States. Pressure from bookstores that want to separate human work from AI-generated material, he writes, will be required.

One of the most common cases, he writes, is an AI-generated voice reading an audiobook. His sample uses role E07 (read by) and UnnamedPersons 07, annotated as a synthesized voice. These are often books that would not otherwise be in audio at all, which he says makes the list more varied and helps accessibility. Depending on the code, the voice might be an AI licensed and trained to sound like a real actor, an "authorized voice replica" in the term he attributes to the Audio Publishers Association, or a more generic generated voice. The actor's real name, or the brand name of a generic voice, can go in AlternativeName inside the same contributor block. He also writes that AI-written image descriptions can help the accessibility of ebooks.

Saying a human made it

For a book with no AI involvement, Bell describes two ways to say so.

The first is a third-party certificate that the creator is a real person. He names the Authors Guild and the UK Society of Authors, which provide an online "Human Authored" certificate. Our pages for the Authors Guild and the Society of Authors collect their news. Proudly Human and Books by People, he writes, do something similar, and there are others. Each service is relatively new and has some limitations, he writes, and each aims to be a trusted source of provenance. As he describes them, each requires an affidavit or a statement with some legal value from the author, supplies a logo for the book, and gives a URL to a certificate a buyer can check.

That URL is what the ONIX holds. His sample is a Website block with role 55, annotated as human-created certification, a description such as "Human Authored certified," and a link. The example he gives is a certificate for one title, Antony Johnston's Can You Solve the Murder. The limit is specific. A certificate covers that creator and that work together. It does not automatically apply to the same person's other books.

The second way is a statement by the publisher: a company-wide line that the house does not use AI for content creation, or a statement about a single book. He calls it a blunt instrument. A URL can still go in the Website block, under a different role code. A first-party statement, he writes, is probably most valuable for publishers with well-known brands, and a legal department should be involved before a company-wide declaration goes out.

What this means if you publish independently

These are fields in an ONIX record, the file a distributor or metadata tool can send with a book. Bell does not say which shops display them. If a system translated, narrated, or wrote the book, his samples put it on its own contributor line: 09 for generative AI, 07 for a synthesized voice, with your name kept separate. Volunteering that line may compromise U.S. copyrightability, which is why he expects bookstores, rather than publishers, to demand it.

To say a human wrote the book, send a URL. Role 55 points at a third-party certificate for this specific book, and whoever builds the ONIX has to pass the link. A certificate on an older title does not follow you. A house's own no-AI statement is the other route, and he says it matters more when readers already know the publisher.

What he says is still open

Short of a law that requires disclosure, Bell writes, nothing really catches bad actors, or publishers who skip AI and also skip both the certificate and the declaration. He likens the logos to FSC marks on paper, and writes that Human Authored and Proudly Human will likely take a long time to sway buyers. The first step, he writes, is to put the facts in the metadata and on the book.

Further detail is in EDItEUR's ONIX application note Aspects of AI in ONIX.

Sources

• Graham Bell, Book Industry Study Group, October 19, 2026: Signaling AI involvement and human authorship in ONIX metadata