The question of artificial intelligence and publishing is no longer a distant or theoretical one, it is already inside the contracts being signed today, and authors who do not know what to look for are at risk of signing away rights they may not even know exist. The Authors Guild, the oldest and largest professional organisation for writers in the United States, has published a set of model contract clauses specifically addressing AI, and for African authors who publish with American and international trade publishers, these clauses are worth understanding in some detail.

The model clauses cover four major areas: prohibiting AI use of an author’s work without their consent; licensing specific AI uses as subsidiary rights with fair compensation; protecting audiobook and translation rights from AI uses without the author’s approval; and governing both the author’s permissible use of AI in submitted manuscripts and the publisher’s use of AI in connection with the work. The most foundational of these, and the one the Authors Guild says should appear in every trade agreement, is a clause that simply states the publisher has no AI rights unless they are expressly granted. In plain terms: if your contract does not say the publisher can use your work to train AI systems, they cannot. But if the contract is silent on the matter, that silence may be exploited. The Guild’s most important takeaway is that any and all grants of AI rights to publishers should be expressly negotiated.

The clause on audiobooks and translation is particularly relevant for African authors, whose works frequently travel into other languages and formats. The Authors Guild’s model audiobook clause requires that publishers not permit a work to be narrated by AI without the author’s prior and express written consent, and the translation clause similarly requires written consent before any AI translation is produced, while clarifying that a human translator may use AI as an assistive tool, provided that the translation substantially comprises human creation and the translator reviews and approves each word. Without clauses like these in place, a publisher could theoretically produce an AI-narrated audiobook or an AI-generated Swahili translation of your novel without asking you.

There is also the question of what publishers are already doing with manuscripts before publication. The Authors Guild has raised concern about reports that some publishing professionals are uploading manuscripts and authors’ personal information into public, consumer-facing AI systems for generating summaries, assessments, and marketing copy without permission from authors or adequate guardrails to prevent the manuscripts from being used by AI companies for training. The Guild’s model clause addresses this directly, requiring that publishers obtain written permission before uploading a work to any such system, and that they opt out of allowing the work to be used for training. A separate clause prohibits publishers from using AI to substantially edit a manuscript, protecting the integrity of the author’s voice at the level of the sentence.

For authors who may be open to licensing their work for AI uses, the Guild’s model clause sets out a revenue-sharing framework. Training rights, that is, licensing a book to train a machine learning model or large language model, are recommended to return 80 to 90 percent of revenues to the author, with the publisher receiving 10 to 20 percent, reflecting that the publisher’s role in such a deal is closer to that of a licensing agent than a creative partner. For uses such as RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation, which allows systems to query a book for summaries or answers) or “chat with a book” functions, a 50/50 split is suggested. These splits are not binding, they are a starting point for negotiation, but they signal what equitable compensation might look like in a market that is still being defined.

This is a fast-moving area of publishing law, and the landscape will continue to shift. But the Authors Guild’s model clauses represent the clearest framework currently available for authors seeking to protect their work. African writers publishing in the United States, or with any publisher operating under US contract terms, should ask their agents and publishers about these provisions before signing. The full set of model clauses, along with guidance on how to use them, is available at authorsguild.org.