Authors Can Defend Against AI Allegations With ‘Paper Trail’ Tools. Is It Enough?

She also has a legal claim to fame: Bartz was the lead plaintiff in a class-action suit against Anthropic that alleged the company had downloaded millions of copyrighted books from pirate sites to use as training data for its models. Anthropic last year agreed to pay $1.5 billion in the largest copyright settlement in US history.

But while Bartz and many other writers were on guard against this plunder of their work, another AI threat was brewing. What happens when authors are accused of relying on artificial intelligence themselves?

This past March, the publishing industry found out: Following widespread speculation on social media that a horror novel titled Shy Girl was largely AI-generated, and a Times article about those claims, Hachette Book Group canceled an upcoming US publication run for…