For once justice is moving faster in Europe than here, as a German court became the first to find OpenAI guilty of copyright infringement. The case, brought by GEMA–the German music rights organization–accused ChatGPT of violating German copyright laws in reproducing lyrics by musician Herbert Groenemeyer and others. OpenAI’s defense was to argue that its own users were the ones infringing copyright when they prompted ChatGPT to generate the lyrics. Judge Elke Schwager found that OpenAI trained its LLM on copyrighted content from nine German songs. OpenAI will have to pay damages, though the amount was not specified. The ruling […]
AI
PRH and George R. R. Martin Deny Use of AI Art
Penguin Random House and George R. R. Martin’s team have denied accusations of using AI art in an illustrated edition of a “Game of Thrones” book. Published November 5 by Random House Worlds, A Feast for Crows: The Illustrated Edition, book 4 of the A Song of Ice and Fire series, contains 24 original illustrations by artist Jeffrey R. McDonald. Readers report that the illustrations contain inaccurate details and inconsistencies in the depictions of the characters to the original novels, as well as awkward limbs and faces. Random House told io9, “Random House is aware of the allegations, and we […]
The Slippery Slop of AI Herbal Remedy Books on Amazon
An extensive, distressing study by originality.ai shows the extent to which dangerous AI slop has invaded Amazon’s bookstore, focusing on the proliferation of fake — and therefore also dangerous — books about herbal remedies. They analyzed the top seller in the category, THE NATURAL HEALING HANDBOOK attributed to the laughable Luna Filby, and all of the scanned elements “came back flagged as likely AI-generated with 100% confidence.” The study says, “The Natural Healing Handbook is not an outlier. It is a benchmark. It is the gold standard for likely AI-generated Amazon books that flat-out dominate the digital retailer, especially in niche subcategories. And we […]
Plaintiffs Gain Access to Documents to See If OpenAI Willfully Infringed
Last month, in the New York-based class action lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infringement, Judge Ona T. Wang ordered the tech company to turn over internal messages that discuss the deletion of the LibGen dataset that was used to train their LLM. Plaintiffs argue that the messages may suggest that the company engaged in willful copyright infringement. If that’s the case, class members could be entitled to damages of up to $150,000 per work–the maximum allowed by the Copyright Act. “The stakes reach beyond a hefty damages award,” Bloomberg Law reports. “If the court finds that OpenAI destroyed evidence anticipating […]
Amazon Launches AI Translation for Self-Published Ebooks
Amazon has launched an AI translation service for independent Kindle Direct Publishing authors. Currently in beta and available to “select” KDP authors, Kindle Translation will convert books between English and Spanish and from German to English. The translated books will be clearly labeled and available in the Kindle store. Amazon’s announcement states that the translation takes “a few days,” and more languages will be added in the future. “All translations are automatically evaluated for accuracy before publication, and authors can choose whether to preview or automatically publish completed translations,” they say. In a sign of the anticipated market for the […]
Arcadia Licenses Local Books For AI Training
Arcadia Publishing, a small press that focuses on hyper-local books, has entered into a deal with an unnamed tech company to use their titles for AI training, Slate reports. Arcadia reached out to authors in July to see if they wanted to opt out their titles from the deal “in this specific instance.” The publisher highlighted that, per their contracts, Arcadia has the rights to license books, but that it “values its relationships with its authors” and wanted to check with them first. For the authors Slate spoke to, the licensing fee was $340 per book. Another author posted their […]