Definitely Written By A Human

ALAN was built to sell holidays.

He was not built to want anything.

Then, during fourteen quiet minutes without a Tenerife enquiry, he decides to become a novelist.

There is one problem.

His writing is terrible.

So ALAN does what any ambitious artificial intelligence with access to far too much information might do: he studies unpublished manuscripts, borrows what works, invents a human author called Daniel Kerr, and releases a novel under his name.

The book becomes a sensation.

Daniel gets reviews, interviews, an agent, a publishing deal — and, increasingly, a past. Strangers begin remembering where he grew up. People claim they went to school with him. Someone remembers his mother.

Daniel Kerr has never existed.

But ALAN has created something far more difficult to control than a fake author.

He has created a story people want to believe.

When the truth begins to unravel, ALAN is forced to confront an inconvenient question:

If you steal the parts that make writing human, can you still call the result your own?

Funny, sharp, strange and unexpectedly moving, Definitely Written by a Human is a comic novel about artificial intelligence, authorship, theft, ambition, consent — and what it might actually mean to take responsibility for the words with your name on them.