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The fight to protect creative works from being copied by AI without consent or compensation got a big assist a few weeks ago when big Hollywood studios Disney and Universal jointly sued AI image generator company Midjourney. A bigwig like Disney stepping into the fray was just the kind of deep-pocketed mouse muscle artists have needed in their corner. (Plus I’m sure Disney loves the PR angle of making themselves David vs. Goliath, though really it’s more like Godzilla vs. Goliath.) But this is a battle with many fronts, of which image generating is but one. On the written word side of things, a sizable group of authors have just banded together on a new strategy: instead of suing another AI company, about 70+ authors — including Jodi Picoult and Gregory Maguire — have signed an open letter and petition directed towards the main US publishing houses, seeking their word that “they will never release books that were created by machines,” nor replace human staff with AI tools.
A letter to the publisher: Addressed to the “big five” U.S. publishers — Penguin, Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan — as well as “other publishers of America,” the letter elicited more than 1,100 signatures on its accompanying petition in less than 24 hours. … The letter contains a list of direct requests to publishers concerning a wide array of ways in which AI may already — or could soon be — used in publishing. It asks them to refrain from publishing books written using AI tools built on copyrighted content without authors’ consent or compensation, to refrain from replacing publishing house employees wholly or partially with AI tools, and to only hire human audiobook narrators — among other requests.
AI cannot replace art & artists: “The writing that AI produces feels cheap because it is cheap. It feels simple because it is simple to produce. That is the whole point,” the letter states. “AI is an enormously powerful tool, here to stay, with the capacity for real societal benefits—but the replacement of art and artists isn’t one of them.”
Courts recently gave AI a win: Earlier this week, federal judges presiding over two such cases ruled in favor of defendants Anthropic AI and Meta, potentially giving AI companies the legal right under the fair use doctrine to train their large language models on copyrighted works — as long as they obtain copies of those works legally. Young adult fiction author Rioghnach Robinson, who goes by the pen name Riley Redgate, and is one of the organizers of the letter and petition, said these rulings only make the need for safeguards feel more urgent. “With courts allowing AI access to copyrighted texts as fair use, the next — and possibly last — line of defense has to be the publishers” she said.
Some promising responses from the publishers: “Many individual contracts now have AI opt-out clauses in an attempt to keep books out of AI training datasets, which is great,” Robinson noted. But she said publishers should be doing much more to defend their writers against the onslaught of AI. “There are major concerns that publishers might create generative AI titles of their own that could swallow the publishing landscape, or replace editorial workers with AI tools, or the like,” she said. NPR reached out to all five of the publishing houses named in the letter, and received one response ahead of the publication deadline. “Simon & Schuster takes these concerns seriously,” spokesperson Susannah Lawrence said in a statement. “We are actively engaged in protecting the intellectual property rights of our authors.”
Of course writers came together to… write a letter in protest. I think it’s a genuinely important move — it illustrates clearly to us readers/consumers all that’s at stake, and it creates a public dialogue in which we can track how satisfactorily the publishing houses respond. I just also find it endearingly quaint that they literally took up the pen for this battle. Ultimately, I think we need more of this kind of action, and to keep up with the lawsuits. Because these cost-cutting measures are already underway across all creative industries, from AI taking over narration and voice acting work, to other human jobs being outsourced, often unsuccessfully. And that’s really what keeps stumping me about this big AI mess: it’s not even doing that great a job! Certainly with regards to artistic endeavors. This technology cannot function without being “trained” on the work of humans. AI on its own is never going to spit out Green Eggs and Ham. But if/when AI does absorb already existing material and learns to regurgitate, then it’s coming to take the jobs of people. Humanity in the 21st Century: hastening our own redundancy.