The Label and the Scale

A mark and three verbs

In the United States, the Authors Guild has certified some 6,500 titles under its Human Authored mark. In Britain, Books By People awards a mark for organic literature; in France, Librinova certifies création humaine. And for the 2026 Frankfurt Book Fair, eighteen German-language children’s publishers introduced a joint label made of three verbs: Von Menschen · geschrieben · gestaltet · geprüft — by people: written, designed, checked. The label, the publishers write, is no general verdict on the use of artificial intelligence; what counts is the creative core.

The marks are growing in the shadow of suspicion. A debut novel from Montreal was taken out of the running for the Goncourt after its publisher analysed file metadata — the author denies having had it written by machine. A horror novel was pulled by a major publisher. Every one of these marks comes down to a single yes. This note is about what the labels get right, and what their form has no room for.

A stance

Such a label is first of all a profession of principle. It says how books ought to be made, and it says so openly. One of the Frankfurt publishers puts it in a sentence: making children’s books is an art, not something artificial. The Guild created its mark because members wanted “a way to stand behind their work.”

This is a stance, and it is a legitimate one. Whoever holds that children’s books shape values, language and pictures of the world may ask that their core come from human hands, and may print as much on the cover. The publishers do so under their names and logos. They do not hide their claim behind a testing procedure; they stand for it.

The right procedure

None of these labels measures anything. The Guild vets no manuscript; it knows, it says, of no truly reliable way to test whether a work contains machine-generated material. Instead it has the origin warranted by contract, verifies identity, keeps a public register, and warns of significant damages for misuse. In October, Canadian publishers described the same path: detectors have proven unreliable; the assurance sits in the contract. A Toronto publisher puts it in one sentence: “We have to rely on you to tell us what it is that you’ve done.”

That is the architecture this project stands on. Self-declaration backed by liability is vouching — the information is fetched where alone it exists: with the one who wrote. Why no instrument can supply it is set out in The Witch Trial. The labels have reached the same place by their own road, carried by associations and publishers with thousands of authors behind them. The confirmation stands without qualification.

The creative core

The difference begins at a line both labels draw. The Frankfurt label makes the creative core decisive and expressly allows tools within the publishing house. The Guild exempts spelling and grammar checks, and the index at the back of the book; brainstorming and outlining it allows “only at a very high level.” And it excludes developing characters and plot with a machine — even where not a single generated sentence ends up in the book.

That last provision is precise. It separates two things a book can draw from the Sprachsubstrat — the language substrate, what a language model supplies in statistically probable formulation: the surface of the sentences and the construction behind them. To distinguish a core from its shell, and to rank exceptions by their weight, is to describe a gradation. The list of exceptions is the proof that the matter comes in degrees. The format still has a single value for all of it, and the value is yes.

The zero point

The seal of this project, Maschinenschrift, records origin on two scales from zero to five: Wortlaut — how much of the linguistic surface came from the substrate; Geist — how much of the ideas, the arguments, the construction. Then Beleg: whether the factual claims were checked against sources outside the substrate. On this scale, Human Authored is not a special case but a value: W 0 · G 0. A book that rightly carries the label can declare that value and lose nothing. The reverse does not hold. The label prescribes the origin. The scale prescribes only the account.

This project has a norm too: that what is the case be said. How a book ought to be made, it does not prescribe. The label does — and so the author whose outline a substrate smoothed, or whose sentences it helped phrase, is left without a place. She is not condemned. She is simply not described. She can stay silent or round down, and silence becomes suspect: whether a book without the mark will come to count as machine-made is a question Jane Friedman passed on to the Guild from her readers; the Guild’s reply does not take it up. Whoever has something to declare finds no place for it on the label. Sebastian Guggolz, head of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, put it to AFP in the week of the fair: “There’s no simple ‘with AI’ or ‘without AI.’”

What someone stands behind

The Guild itself treats its mark as an interim measure. Labelling AI-generated content, its CEO Mary Rasenberger writes, would be “of course preferable”; the Guild keeps fighting for it.

And whoever shares the labels’ stance needs Maschinenschrift’s scale most. Only someone who is told can choose; only someone who is told what there is to avoid can avoid it. The share of manuscripts that touch no substrate anywhere will not grow. A label that knows only yes loses not rigour but reach. A scale has a value for every book to come — the one written entirely by hand included.

The authors who wanted the Guild’s mark wanted to stand behind their work. The label gives them a form in which to stand for a stance; only those who meet it can vouch on that basis. On the scale, anyone can. The label says what someone stands for. The scale says what someone stands behind.

On the notation of the axes: Siegel-Spec v8. The derivation of the term: Substrate, not Machine.

Self-declaration of this note: W 5 · G 3. Occasion from the book-fair coverage; the distinction between stance and account, and the choice of the closing point, with the editor; elaboration and linguistic surface substrate-mediated; quotations checked against the linked sources; selection and responsibility with the editor. On the label, this note would have no place. On the scale, it stands here.