Human Author Certification; Mini Movie Review: 'Mickey 17'

Credit: Pixabay.com

Updated at 6:53 PM on 3/21/2025

I won't be wishing anyone a Happy St. Patrick's Day here since it was originally a Catholic festival and so I try not to mix my religious beliefs with my blog posts, and I don't celebrate the commercialized, secular version of it. (I barely celebrate the religious version, unorthodox Catholic that I am.) Moving on ... The Author's Guild has come up with a service that helps consumers distinguish human authored books from AI authored ones. Paula Cappa discusses this in detail at her blog, which my comment on is below. I also have a mini movie review of "Mickey 17", which I saw over the weekend. So, read on! 

Certification of Human-Authored Books

The problem with books that are written by artificial intelligence (AI) is that they can hide the human-authored ones on the market and, in doing so, demean the human characteristic called creativity. A market bombarded with AI-written books would basically say that human-created art is no longer needed, a skill and gift that was meant for humans and is one of the many characteristics that distinguishes humans from other animals. 

When used to do a human writer’s work, generative AI, the AI used to generate content in either text or pictorial form, is basically mad science. It's the invention of ingenuity that technologists are allowing to overtake the role of the human artist and storyteller. However, the Authors' Guild, an organization that supports the creative rights of writers, may be coming up with a solution to this problem. Author Paula Cappa discusses this in her blog post for 11 March, entitled "AI, Meta, Zuckerman, Pirated Books, and Shadow Libraries". It's very interesting and informing, not just for writers but for readers who only read human-written work. 

The gist of Paula’s article is, however, that AG has come up with a registry service where authors can register their books and each book will receive a certification badge that declares it has been written by a human author and not AI.  AG also pushes for laws that require a book to disclose that it's been written by AI. I talk about why I support AG in its demand for these laws in my comment to her post . . . 

"You are so right about what you said.

I would not want my work to be hidden among AI-written works, and as a consumer/reader I would not want to have to be researching hour on end just to see if a book I am interested in purchasing or checking out at the library (if libraries will allow AI-written work onto their shelves) was written by a human being or a machine.

So, as a member of the AG, I’ve voted for laws to be established that require works that are written by AI to disclose that.

I’ll also look into the AG’s service of registering books for proof of human-authored verification, especially since I’ll be self-publishing my next full book of short stories soon. So, thanks for sharing about that service! I didn’t even know about it until you mentioned it."

Mini Movie Review: 'Mickey 17' 

This satirical science fiction film is based on Edward Ashton's novel, "Mickey 7" and is directed by Bong Joon Ho who directed 2006's "The Host". And I can tell you now, I liked his "Host" way better than this movie. The story to “Mickey 17” is that Mickey Barnes takes the job of “expendable”, a person who is used in dangerous experiments but is cloned, or “printed” out, if they don't survive. The plot is great. The creature effects are super and there’s a meaningful social justice and environmental message in the movie. What makes the movie fall short is that the violence and foul language exploitation drown out the humour and, likewise, distracts from the story. I found the protagonists unlikeable for the most part. I cared more about some of the minor characters, and that’s not an exaggeration. So, “Mickey 17” is basically Hollywood exploitation of a movie that’s supposed to comment on society and its technology like good science fiction does. I really hope that Ashton's novel is far more better than this one. 

I'm still working on the newsletter and so hope to get it out by the end of the month. Keep checking back here and at my Facebook page for progress on it. If you haven’t subscribed to it, you can do so here. It’s free! Do you think AI-written books on the market would crowd out human written books there. Have you seen "Mickey 17"?

Until next time . . . 

Please Note: An error was discovered in this post. The error was in the post's title which read "Human Author Certification; Mini Book Review: 'Mickey 17'" when it should read "Human Author Certification; Mini Movie Review: 'Mickey 17'". This error has been corrected and the blogger apologises for the mistake.