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 […]
AI
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 […]
News Corp CFO Discusses Audio and AI Partnerships
At the Deutsche Bank Media, Internet, and Telecom Conference yesterday, News Corp CFO Susan Panuccio addressed Harper Collins’ disappointing results last year, partnering with Spotify, and the use of AI technology. Panuccio attributed Harper’s 2023 sales, which fell 10 percent, to “the Amazon reset with their logistics” and inflationary pressures on manufacturing. Additionally, she said, “quite frankly, we didn’t have as good of frontlist as what we have had in other years.” Still, Harper has succeeded in cutting costs and is in good shape for the rest of the year, she said, with the 5 percent reduction in headcount, as […]
Dutch Publisher Develops AI Books
Dutch nonfiction publisher Maven has developed AI books, allowing readers to engage with a title by messaging with it. Built on the full text of a book—but without the ability to read straight through—the AI book is embedded as a WhatsApp contact and works by messaging in the app. The company markets the AI book as its own separate format, to sit alongside a regular full-text edition. “Although this is not a linear one,” Maven publisher Sanders Ruys said. “You don’t consume it from start to finish.” The AI book is built to be conversational, and users can ask it […]