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 […]
AI
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 […]
Academic Study Shows General Readers May Prefer AI Generated Text Over Expert Writing
New York District Court Judge Sidney H. Stein’s ruling allowing a trial to proceed on authors’ allegations that ChatGPT infringes copyright found that the LLM’s outputs include “such copyrightable elements of plaintiffs’ original works as plot, setting, and characters.” In denying OpenAI’s motion to dismiss, he determined that the author plaintiffs cleared the bar of having “alleged some outputs that a reasonable jury could find are substantially similar to plaintiffs’ works.” Judge Stein’s analysis of both summaries of books by George R.R. Martin and AI-generated outlines for sequels to those books “convey[s] the overall tone and feel of the original […]
Consolidated Lawsuit Against OpenAI Will Go Forward
A judge in the Southern District of New York denied OpenAI’s motion to dismiss a consolidated class action suit over ChatGPT. The suit combines lawsuits from authors including Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sarah Silverman, Kai Bird, and Victor LaValle, as well as the Authors Guild, alleging that ChatGPT’s outputs are similar to the authors’ work and constitute copyright infringement. Judge Sidney H. Stein determined that the plaintiffs’ argument is strong enough to go to trial. In trying to dismiss, OpenAI argued that ChatGPT summarizing books is the same as summarizing news articles, which “the court determined were not substantially similar to […]
More Anthropic Settlement Documents and Answers Take Shape
In keeping with the court’s deadlines, plaintiffs’ counsel and Anthropic filed numerous additional materials on Tuesday. The attachments here show the proposed Claim Form and the proposed Long-Form Notice that will be sent to potential claimants explaining the settlement. Additionally, the attorneys filed their answers to Judge William Alsup’s 34 additional questions — many of which were already answered by the proposed plan of allocation filed on Monday. In those answers, we learn that the final corrected works list contains 482,460 works. They confirm that for any unclaimed work, those funds will be redistributed among all of the actual claimants. On […]
Author Plaintiffs Propose Claims Process for Anthropic Settlement, Including Default Options
The author plaintiffs submitted details to District Court Judge William Alsup proposing a notification and claims process in the hopes that the judge approves the $1.5 billion Anthropic copyright infringement settlement. Those plans, to be followed today by written answers to Judge Alsup’s 34 detailed questions, were filed ahead of the September 25 hearing, and supported by letters from a wide variety of author and publisher organizations and literary agencies. The filing notes, “The parties have worked around the clock since the Court’s initial preliminary approval hearing on September 8 to address the remaining issues the Court raised at that […]