Harper Collins will create AI audiobooks of select foreign language backlist titles, working with text-to-speech software company ElevenLabs. “The agreement will lead to the production of audio versions of select deep backlist series books that would not otherwise have been created.” ElevenLabs’ interface can create an audiobook in about an hour that will, according to Harper, “reflect the emotion, intonation, and pacing of the written word in audio, delivering a high-quality experience that sounds human,” the Bookseller reports. A release from ElevenLabs states that “HarperCollins will continue to devote time and resources to voice actor-led productions which are intrinsic to […]
AI
Yes, Karp Was Surprised, Too
Regarding the reporting a week ago that Meta considered buying Simon & Schuster to strip mine the catalog for LLM training, the publisher’s ceo Jonathan Karp told a NYT podcast he was just as surprised by the news as you were: “It was really quite an experience for me. So Saturday morning I was eating my breakfast and reading the New York Times…eating my Grape-Nuts… And this was total news to me! I had no idea that this conversation was going on. The story was quoting private conversations that nobody knew about. This really was news to everybody. I’ve checked. […]
Open Submissions, Closed to AI
On Monday, Angry Robot Books announced an open submissions period for late April, but with a twist: “We will be doing things very different this year. We will be using something called Storywise, which is a non generative AI system that will help us sort submissions. This means that it does not learn from author’s works to inform an AI model, and therefore the AI model is not trained by your work.” But the community objected strongly to any use of AI in evaluating authors’ material. The publisher quickly dropped the idea, posting: “We have been watching & listening to […]
Meta Stole Everyone’s Books Because It Was Cheap and Convenient; Considered Buying S&S, But That Was Unnecessary
Big tech has had a voracious appetite for content to train their AI systems and these cash rich nation states all rationalized their way to theft at scale because it was faster and more convenient than legal solutions — and the legal and legislative system is incapable of holding them accountable in any reasonable timeframe. Thanks to its own lawsuit along with its reporting, the NYT documented the scale of illegal hubris: “At Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, managers, lawyers and engineers last year discussed buying the publishing house Simon & Schuster to procure long works, according to recordings […]
New York Lawsuits Against OpenAI Will Proceed
US District Judge Sidney Stein, in New York’s Southern District ruled that a host of New York-based copyright infringement lawsuits against OpenAI, Microsoft and others can proceed. Judge Stein rejected efforts by the Joseph Saveri Law Firm, which represents multiple creator groups in California-based lawsuits, to block or consolidate the New York suits. Those suits include author actions led by the Authors Guild, and followed by other groups of authors, as well as the suit filed by the New York Times. The newspaper’s suit was initially thought to be one of the stronger sets of allegations. As Judge Stein noted, […]
NYT Responds to OpenAI’s “Hacking” Claims
The New York Times responded to OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the paper’s copyright lawsuit, which claimed that the Times “hacked” Chat-GPT in queries to get responses that support their case. According to the Times’ response, OpenAI’s claim is “as irrelevant as it is false.” “OpenAI’s true grievance is not about how The Times conducted its investigation, but instead what that investigation exposed: that Defendants built their products by copying The Times’s content on an unprecedented scale—a fact that OpenAI does not, and cannot, dispute,” lawyers for the paper state in their filing. That OpenAI used the Times’s copyrighted material to […]