AI in the writing process, and what stores ask you to declare
Most of what is written about this is either a warning or a sales pitch. Neither helps when you are standing at an upload form with a question in front of you and a book you would like to publish today.
So, first: this guide does not tell you what any store's rule currently is, and that is deliberate. Disclosure requirements are among the fastest-moving rules in publishing, they differ between stores, and they have been revised more than once since they appeared. Any page that prints a threshold or a checkbox label goes stale the week the store changes it, and a reader trusting it answers a question wrongly. Check the store's own page before every upload — not once, every time.
What is stable is the shape of the thing, and that is worth understanding properly.
Generated and assisted are two different words
The industry has settled on a distinction, and nearly every store's wording sits somewhere on it.
AI-generated means the machine produced the material. You gave a prompt and got text or an image back, and what came back is in the book — whether you edited it afterward or not.
AI-assisted means you produced the material and used a tool while doing it. Brainstorming a plot problem, checking a fact, testing whether a paragraph is clear, catching repeated words, running a proofreading pass over prose you wrote.
Stores generally ask about the first. The second is treated much the way a spell-checker, a thesaurus or a developmental editor is treated: a tool in the process, not an author of the text. That is the distinction to keep in your head, because it is the one the questions are built on.
The honest hard case is the middle: a passage the machine drafted and you rewrote until little of the original survives. Nobody can give you a percentage, and a store that wanted one would have to define it. When you cannot tell which side something is on, the answer that never causes you a problem later is the one that discloses.
Why images get asked about more directly
Cover art is usually asked about more explicitly than prose, and often as a separate question.
The reason is practical rather than philosophical. A cover is a single asset with a clear provenance — it came from somewhere, and you know where. Prose written over a year in a dozen sittings has no such clean answer. A cover is also the part of the book that travels on its own, into store pages, category grids and promotional slots, which gives a store a direct interest in where it came from.
If you are using generated art, AI cover art that does not look like AI cover art covers the craft side. This page is only about the paperwork.
In the tools. Nothing here generates text or artwork for you — you bring your manuscript and your cover art. The one-click enlargement to 300 DPI is ordinary high-quality resampling that runs inside your browser, with no AI involved and nothing uploaded anywhere. Start a book → · about the tools
Keep a record while you work
This is the single practical habit, and it costs almost nothing.
Keep a short note beside the manuscript: which tools you used, for what, and roughly when. Three lines is enough. Generated the cover base image in X, upscaled and repainted by hand. Used Y to check continuity in chapters 9–14. Proofreading pass in Z on the final draft.
The value shows up eighteen months later, when a store adds a question you have not seen before, or you sell the book somewhere new with a different form. Answering is then a matter of reading your own note rather than reconstructing a year of work from memory — and reconstruction is where honest authors give inaccurate answers. Keep it with your other production decisions; see The style sheet: how a series stays consistent.
Two separate obligations
These get confused constantly, and they are unrelated.
A tool's terms of service govern what you may do with its output — commercial use, ownership, attribution, restrictions on the kind of work it may be used for. That is an agreement between you and the tool's maker.
A store's disclosure rules govern what you must tell the store when you upload. That is between you and the retailer.
Satisfying one tells you nothing about the other. A tool that grants full commercial rights does not exempt you from a store's question, and answering that question honestly does not settle whether your license allowed the use. Check both. Stock images: what the license actually lets you do makes the same point about licensed art.
What the tool does with what you send it
Worth knowing before you paste in an unpublished manuscript: some tools use what you send them to develop their own models, and some do not. It is usually a setting, and it is usually described in the privacy terms rather than the marketing.
For a published book this is a minor matter. For a manuscript under submission, an unpublished series, or work covered by a contract that says something about confidentiality, it is not. Find the setting before the first paste, not after.
Copyright is genuinely unsettled
Whether machine-generated material can be registered or protected, and on what terms, varies by country and is actively contested.
We are not going to advise you here, and you should distrust a page that does. If your book depends on the answer — a licensing deal, a contract, a co-author arrangement — that is a question for a lawyer in your country. Copyright: what you have automatically, and what registering adds covers the ordinary case.
The part that does not change
Readers judge the book. They do not audit the process, and a checkbox ticked honestly on an upload form is not what decides whether a book works. Books fail because they are not good enough, or because nobody found them.
Answer the question in front of you accurately, keep a record so that answering stays easy, and put the rest of your attention on the book.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Backing up a manuscript, properly · Also: AI cover art that does not look like AI cover art · Stock images: what the license actually lets you do · Copyright: what you have automatically, and what registering adds