Vellum versus Vellum AI

Recently, books with "Created by Vellum" on the copyright page have been lambasted or had their authors trolled because readers misunderstand what Vellum means and assume the author used AI to write their book.

There is a difference between the software Vellum used to format books and the entirely unrelated platform Vellum AI used to develop LLM apps. Vellum is used by some indie authors to format their books. This is an easy to use software available for Macs that formats beautiful books and was purchased by the author through a one-time license fee.

Vellum AI is a suite of tools for prompt engineering, model versioning, and LLM deployment designed to streamline AI app development.

One is for designing pretty book layouts. The other is an AI development platform.

Going forward, Vellum is changing their phrasing to be "Formatted by Vellum", but that won't help previously published works. And misinformed readers will still assume or not do a quick google search before attacking an author or leaving a bad review.

Whether you're for or against AI-aided writing, it's important to be certain a work is AI-aided or generated before claiming an author used it. This can hurt indie authors just trying to get their words out there. THEIR words, not AI words.

I use Vellum to format my book layouts, but I've never checked the box to display "Created by Vellum." Some authors do and some don't. I recognize the Vellum styles in lots of JAFF and other genres I read. It doesn't mean we're using AI. It means we wanted a user-friendly software to make a beautiful book.

Vellum ≠ Vellum AI