Disclosure: this post is written by the team behind KDP Quick Scout. This isn’t legal advice, publishing policies change, always check KDP’s own current content guidelines before you rely on anything here. The definitions below were checked against KDP’s Content Guidelines on October 8, 2026.
Every few weeks a version of the same question shows up in author forums: “I used ChatGPT to help outline my book, do I have to tell Amazon?” The answers underneath are usually confident and usually contradict each other. Half the thread says any AI tool at all triggers disclosure. The other half says it’s fine as long as you edited it yourself. Both are wrong in ways that matter, and the answer is sitting in Amazon’s own help pages, worded more precisely than either camp gives it credit for.
The distinction
KDP splits AI use into two categories, and only one of them needs to be disclosed.
AI-generated content is Amazon’s term for “text, images, or translations created by an AI-based tool.” This covers your manuscript text, your cover art, interior illustrations, and translated editions. If an AI tool produced the content, it’s AI-generated. Crucially, the policy specifies this applies “even if you applied substantial edits afterwards.” Heavy editing doesn’t move AI-generated content into the undisclosed category. That’s the part the “I rewrote it so it’s fine” argument gets wrong.
AI-assisted content is everything else: brainstorming with an AI tool while you write the words yourself, using it to error-check or refine content you created, running it through a grammar checker. Amazon’s own wording here is direct: “It is not necessary to inform us of the use of such tools or processes.” That’s the part the “any AI tool means disclosure” argument gets wrong.
The line isn’t “did AI touch this book at all.” It’s “did AI produce the words or images that ended up in the book, or did it help you produce them yourself.”
Where the disclosure actually happens
The disclosure is a checkbox in Title Setup, on the Content page, below your manuscript and cover uploads. When you answer yes, a follow-up asks which types apply: text, images, or translations, and authors report one more question about roughly how much editing you applied. The answer goes to Amazon and stops there. Each format has its own Content page, so eBook, paperback, and hardcover each carry their own answer.
Three things follow from that:
- Readers never see it. There is no AI label, asterisk, or badge on your Amazon product page as of 2026, and nothing is printed inside the book. Adding a voluntary note in your front matter is your choice, not a requirement.
- You answer it again when you republish. Editing and republishing a book that now contains AI-generated content is a fresh disclosure. This includes swaps: an AI-generated cover on an otherwise human-written backlist title counts.
- It does not restrict publication by itself. Disclosed AI-generated content is publishable, subject to the same content guidelines, quality bars, and intellectual property rules as everything else on KDP.
Where common author workflows fall
A few concrete cases, since the abstract version of this rule is easy to agree with and still get wrong in practice:
- Asking an AI tool for chapter outline ideas, then writing every chapter yourself. Assisted. The tool never produced text that ended up in the book.
- Asking an AI tool to draft a full chapter, then heavily rewriting it. Generated, per Amazon’s rule that it counts “even if you applied substantial edits afterwards.” The origin of the text matters more than how much you changed it afterward.
- Running your own manuscript through a grammar or style checker. Assisted. You wrote it, the tool is refining it.
- Generating a cover image with an AI art tool. Generated. Cover art is explicitly named alongside text and translations.
- Using an AI tool to research your genre, competitors, or keywords. Assisted, and arguably nowhere near the line: none of that output becomes part of the book itself. This is the category a niche-research tool like KDP Quick Scout’s AI analysis falls into: it’s producing a report you read, not text that goes into your manuscript. Our step-by-step KDP niche research method lives entirely on this side of the line.
- Translating your own book into another language with an AI tool. Generated. Translations are named specifically, the same way text and images are.
- Replacing the cover of an existing human-written book with AI-generated art. Generated, and disclosable when you republish, even though not a single word of the text changed.
A myth worth retiring
“If I write a detailed enough prompt, that counts as writing it myself.” It doesn’t, and this is worth being blunt about because it’s the version of the question that shows up dressed up as a technicality. Amazon’s category is about where the text came from, not about how much creative direction you gave the tool that produced it. A five-paragraph prompt that generates a chapter is still a generated chapter.
The fear nobody documents
“Will ticking the box bury my book?”
Nothing Amazon publishes says so. The disclosure feeds Amazon’s own content management; there is no documented link between a disclosed answer and ranking, visibility, or promotion. Treat “the checkbox hurts your book” as folklore until somebody shows the documentation for it.
What is documented runs the other way: undisclosed AI-generated content is grounds for removal, and you stay responsible under the content guidelines for everything you publish, AI-made or not, including intellectual property rights. When you are genuinely unsure which side you are on, disclose. It costs nothing a reader can ever see.
What if you answered wrong?
Open the title, correct the AI-content answer on the Content page for each affected format, and republish. The question applies when you publish and when you republish, so a fix is just a republish away.
Why this is worth getting right, not just compliant
Beyond the obvious (avoiding a takedown), the disclosure categories are a genuinely useful way to think about where AI belongs in your process. Research, outlining, editing, and error-checking are exactly the parts of publishing where AI assistance is fastest and lowest-risk. You stay the book’s author, and none of it needs a disclosure checkbox. Generating the manuscript itself is a different decision with a different set of trade-offs (disclosure, quality consistency, whether readers can tell), and conflating the two categories, in either direction, just means making that decision by accident instead of on purpose.
If you’re using an AI tool anywhere in your process right now, the one question worth asking honestly is the question the policy is built around: did it write the words, or did you?