Several AI companies have already registered interest in licensing book content through the platform, said Trip Adler, co-founder and CEO of Created by Humans. — Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
The Authors Guild, the largest and oldest professional organisation for writers in the United States, is teaming with a new startup, Created by Humans, to help writers license rights to their books to artificial intelligence (AI) companies.
The partnership, announced Wednesday, comes as authors and publishers are wrestling with the rapid incursion of artificial intelligence into the book world. The internet is already flooded with books generated by AI, and sophisticated chatbots can instantly generate detailed summaries of books and spew out material in the voice and style of popular writers.
The Authors Guild has taken an aggressive stance against the unauthorised use of books by AI companies to train large language models, which power chatbots that can generate complex and often evocative text. Last year, the group brought a class-action lawsuit on behalf of authors against OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, arguing that using books to train Chat GPT’s chatbot without licensing the rights amounts to copyright infringement. (The New York Times also sued OpenAI and Microsoft last year, claiming copyright infringement of news content used by AI systems.)
By endorsing Created by Humans’ platform, the Authors Guild is in a sense acknowledging that there is no avoiding the disruption that AI has unleashed on the book business. Through their partnership, the Authors Guild will help Created by Humans develop informational webinars for authors that will explain how licensing works and what their options are.
“What’s good about licensing is it gives the author and the publisher control, as well as compensation, and it gives you the ability to say no,” said Mary Rasenberger, CEO the Authors Guild, who will serve on Created by Humans’ advisory board. “Right now, it’s the AI companies that just went and crawled pirate websites and swept all that material in.”
Several AI companies have already registered interest in licensing book content through the platform, said Trip Adler, co-founder and CEO of Created by Humans. Adler declined to name the companies, citing nondisclosure agreements.
“We want to be the company that sticks up for and protects the work of human creators, while also helping them navigate AI and profit off it,” said Adler, who previously co-founded and led Scribd, a digital subscription service for books and audio content.
How this would work in practice for authors is still hazy. Created by Humans, which launched in June with US$5mil (RM21mil) in funding from investors, hasn’t revealed a precise payment model, and Adler declined to elaborate on how much authors would potentially make, noting that the market is still nascent.
The company has been testing the platform with a handful of authors and plans to launch officially later this year, Adler said. It has recruited a prominent backer from the literary world, writer Walter Isaacson, who is an investor and adviser to Created by Humans.
Isaacson, who has written bestselling biographies of Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci and Elon Musk, said he plans to license his own books for use by AI companies, and has urged his publisher, Simon & Schuster, to use the platform for its other books and authors.
“This is a major inflection point, just as the invention of search engines like Google was, in which people who create content could benefit hugely, or get left behind,” Isaacson said in an interview.
Authors who use Created by Humans will be able to create a profile and indicate which books they want to license, and for what type of use. The platform separates licensing rights into several categories, including one that grants tech companies the right to use books to train large language models, another that enables companies to reference works in real time to provide quotes or summaries, and another category for transformative rights, which allow AI users to create new derivative works based on an author’s books. Such works could include books written in an author’s voice and style, works using a writer’s plot and characters, or new works, like a graphic novel, based on the original book.
Even if authors and publishers are able to earn money from AI companies, the proliferation of AI-generated material could still hurt the industry. For instance, if popular authors decide to license their books for transformative use, allowing for AI-generated work based on their characters or plots, the market could quickly be overrun with copycat books, making it harder for other human authors to find an audience.
Rasenberger countered that a licensing platform will actually help combat the proliferation of AI-generated books by limiting the unauthorised use of writers’ work.
“The introduction of licensing will actually curb unrestricted use and limit the current flooding of the marketplace,” Rasenberger said. “The licensees, as well as the authors and publishers, will be incentivised to enforce their rights against unauthorised uses.”
Novelist Douglas Preston, a former president of the Authors Guild, said many writers he knows are suspicious of AI licensing and worry that it will give more fuel to AI companies. But Preston himself is more optimistic: He is an investor in Created by Humans, and plans to license his books through the platform. Still, he’s still worried about AI-generated books that use his style or characters, he said.
“It could be that AI starts creating works that are directly competing with me in the marketplace,” he said, “and I certainly wouldn’t want that.” – ©2024 The New York Times Company
