We can expect future versions of GPT and other text generators to equal or surpass human writing ability. Maybe in twenty of thirty years an AI will be able to write novels as good or greater than a Pynchon novel, for example.

Even if this were the case I still think that human writers would still write and publish novels, and that a niche audience would still prefer human books to AI books. But how would we tell them apart?

My question is could there be an official way to determine if text is GPT generated or not? For example, a public database which includes a history of all GPT outputs, and anyone can go on the database and search the book or parts of it and see if it's in the database. Otherwise maybe people will record themselves writing in a protected environment proving that they wrote it without AI assistance, this is obviously what is done in Chess and Go and other competitive games which have been "solved" by AI and is likely what keeps these games thriving. If literature is to continue as a human artform will we need to develop something similar.

This also applies to cheating in University, news articles, etc. What do you think?