Society of Authors

• If The World Were 100 People helps children to better understand the world they live in by imagining the world was condensed to a small village of 100 people and explaining what this global village would look like.
• Jackie McCann and Aaron Cushley were presented the 2023 Educational Writers' Award, along with a prize of £2,000, at the ALCS Annual Awards ceremony held at the Goldsmiths' Centre in London on 22 February.
• ALCS Chief Executive Barbara Hayes said: "Good educational writing not only imparts knowledge to the reader, but also inspires a curiosity to go and learn more about the world.
• In all, the Society of Authors administers twenty-one prizes, including the ALCS Educational Writers' Award and the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award.

• Thousands of Australian books have been found on a pirated dataset of ebooks, known as Books3, used to train generative AI.
• Richard Flanagan, Helen Garner, Tim Winton and Tim Flannery are among the leading local authors affected – along, of course, with writers from around the world.

AI moving at speed

• Just last year, the issue of AI was only faintly on the cultural radar.
• But while AI technology is moving at high speed, the law moves slowly.
• Read more:
  Authors are resisting AI with petitions and lawsuits.

A spate of copyright disputes

• There has been a spate of copyright disputes around AI datasets and copyright-protected works.
• Earlier this month, the US Authors Guild filed a class action, with 17 authors including Jonathan Franzen and Jodi Picoult, against OpenAI for copyright infringement.
• This followed the first copyright lawsuit against OpenAI in July.

Copyright is not the answer

• Likewise, copyright law’s rules on fair dealing in Australia and fair use in the United States would likely protect some uses.
• Read more:
  Prosecraft has infuriated authors by using their books without consent – but what does copyright law say?

‘A type of market failure’

• The difference then was that these technologies did not fundamentally threaten artistic and creative labour in the way AI does.
• To appropriate a part of someone’s market is a radically different thing to producing a product that could entirely displace them in that market.
• A type of market failure is occurring here, because authors are not being compensated even though their works, collectively, are the basis for new and commercially viable AI products.

• In the United States last week, the Authors Guild submitted an open letter to the chief executives of prominent AI companies, asking AI developers to obtain consent from, credit and fairly compensate authors.
• The letter was signed by more than 10,000 authors and their supporters, including James Patterson, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Franzen and Margaret Atwood.
• Unpacking these concerns often reveals as much about existing practices of writing and publishing as it does about the new technology.

How does AI work?

• Such models examine how text is constructed, and essentially calculate the statistical likelihood certain words will appear together.
• In other words, generative AI creates a purely structural, probabilistic understanding of language and uses that to guess a plausible response.
• If you can access writing in your browser, it’s safe to assume AI models are using it.
• In the world’s first copyright-related ChatGPT lawsuit, two US authors (Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay) are currently suing OpenAI, claiming their books were used to train the AI software without their consent.

Can AI generate ‘human’ writing?

• Browsing Amazon in July 2023, 984 books explicitly attribute ChatGPT, the best-known and most widely used generative AI, as an author.
• But can generative AI produce acceptably human creative writing?
• These articles, however, are procedural, fill-in-the-blanks style affairs: a kind of computational madlibs of exchange rates and share prices.
• Similarly, unlike the AP example, this work is “original” insomuch as it is a new, previously non-existent piece of creative text.
• Read more:
  Replacing news editors with AI is a worry for misinformation, bias and accountability

AI and ‘the bestseller code’

• The flurry of replies included authors such as Jennifer Brody, who managed to include AI protections in recent contract negotiations.
• Overwhelmingly, however, provisions regarding AI are not yet explicitly included in author contracts.
• At what point does a clause in an author contract regarding AI usage mean an author can’t use their own writing to generate new work?
• Publishers acquiring the right to use manuscripts to train generative AI is speculative.
• Some are suggesting AI will render the author disposable: publishers will be able to package and market any piece of AI-generated text.

What do we value?

• It’s that these are values are at the heart of reading and writing.
• Henry James wrote that the:
  deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer.
• deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer.

• NEW YORK, Feb. 9, 2022 /PRNewswire/ --Sony Music Publishing today announced it has appointed Roberto Razzini as Managing Director, Italy, effective March 1.
• He will work closely with Sony Music Publishing Italy's General Manager Roberto Curti and will report to President, International Guy Henderson.
• I am honored by the opportunity - this prestigious corporation represents excellence in the global music business and it is inspiring to be a part of Sony Music Publishing.
• Sony Music Publishing President, International Guy Henderson said, "It is such a pleasure to welcome Roberto to Sony Music Publishing.