My AI Policy

Like most authors right now, I’ve been thinking carefully about where AI fits into my work and my relationship with readers. I want to be straightforward about where I stand.

My books are protected.

Both Out of Time and Next Time carry an explicit no-AI-training notice in their copyright pages, and that protection extends to Our Time and any future work published under Cole Jacobs Books. The stories, characters, prose, and creative work in my novels are not available for use in training generative AI systems. That boundary matters to me, and it isn’t going anywhere.

My website content is intentionally open.

Blog posts, author bio, series descriptions, newsletter archives, and other promotional content on this site are available to AI crawlers. This is a deliberate choice, not an oversight. If someone asks an AI tool to recommend books featuring older protagonists, parallel timelines, or Thoughtful Speculative Romance, I want my work to show up. The whole point of this content is to reach readers, and AI is increasingly part of how readers discover books they’ll love.

I use AI tools in my process.

I’ll be honest: I use AI as a research assistant, a sounding board for marketing ideas, and yes, a grammar checker. Here’s the thing about having an MSc in Hydrogeology and an MBA from Queen’s University: neither degree spent much time on the finer points of comma placement in fiction. I came to novel writing with a scientist’s instincts and a marketer’s instincts, but not an MFA. AI helps fill that particular gap without judgment, which I appreciate.

What it does not do is write my stories. Every creative decision, every character choice, every word that ends up in a Maddie and Nate novel comes from me. My voice, my research, my decades of lived experience feeding into characters who feel real because they’re built from something real. That part can’t be outsourced, and it’s the part I care most about protecting.

If you have questions about any of this, feel free to reach out at mjmurray@colejacobsbooks.com.

Last updated: May 2026