AI disclosure on Amazon KDP: what actually has to be declared

If you self-publish through Amazon KDP, the upload form asks whether your book contains AI-generated content. A lot of authors freeze at that question, because the honest answer for most working writers in 2026 is "sort of, in places, depending what you mean".

Amazon's own framing is narrower than the panic suggests, and it is worth reading carefully rather than guessing.

Note on currency: this describes Amazon's policy as published at the time of writing. Retailer rules change. Check the current KDP content guidelines before you upload — do not rely on a blog post, including this one.

The line Amazon draws

Amazon separates two things:

AI-generated content is text, images or translations created by an AI tool, even if you then edited them substantially. This must be disclosed at upload.

AI-assisted content is your own work, where an AI tool helped you refine, edit, brainstorm or check it. This does not require disclosure.

The distinction is about origin, not about how much AI was involved. Running your finished chapter through a copyeditor model is assistance. Asking a model to write the chapter and then rewriting half of it is generation — the sentences began with the machine.

Where fantasy authors actually sit

Most of the uses that matter in a fantasy workflow fall on the assisted side:

• Asking for five names that fit a naming convention you defined
• Checking a chapter against your lore for contradictions
• A copyedit pass for repetition, tense slips and POV drift
• Summarising your own previous chapters to remind yourself what happened
• Brainstorming what a faction would plausibly do next

These are tools acting on your work. None of them originate the prose.

The generation side is narrower and easier to recognise than people fear: text that was drafted by the model and accepted into the manuscript. If you asked for a scene and kept it, that is generated content, and it is declarable even after heavy editing.

The practical problem: remembering

The rule is clear enough. The difficulty is answering it accurately eight months later, for a book with forty-one chapters, when you genuinely cannot remember whether chapter thirty-four was drafted or merely tidied.

This is why Fantasy Writer records it as you go. Every time AI-written text is accepted into a chapter, that gets marked against the chapter, and the count is shown at publish time. It is not a judgement — nothing in the product discourages generation — it is simply a record, so that when Amazon asks, you can answer from data rather than memory.

What we would suggest

Declare when in doubt. The disclosure is not a scarlet letter; it is not shown to readers on the product page, and it does not affect how the book is sold. The cost of over-declaring is nearly zero. The cost of under-declaring is a policy violation on an account you depend on.

Keep the record as you write, not at the end. Reconstructing provenance retroactively is guesswork, and guesswork is what the disclosure question is designed to eliminate.

Do not let it change how you draft. The policy exists to inform Amazon, not to shape your process. Use the tools that make the book better and be straightforward about which ones wrote sentences.