Another copyright lawsuit from authors against a tech company for AI training is allowed to continue in Northern California federal court, a judge decided. Plaintiffs Stewart O’Nan, Abdi Nazemian, Brian Keene, Rebecca Makkai, and Jason Reynolds claim that MosaicML, which provides training data for AI companies and is owned by Databricks, used the Books3 dataset to train their own large language model, called MPT, and Databricks’s LLM, called DBRX. Judge Charles B. Dreyer denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss, stating “Defendants may ultimately prevail on this issue, but for now, Plaintiffs’ allegations are sufficient.” The tech company did succeed in getting […]
AI
Chatbot Company Creates “Books”
People who have longed to inhabit the literary worlds of Oz, Verona, and West Egg without having to crack a book are in luck. Controversial chatbot company Character.ai has created an “interactive storytelling experience” simply titled Books. Users can play a text-based game using public domain works sourced from Project Gutenberg including Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, Romeo & Juliet, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The company purports to offer “All the classics. Even the ones you never finished.” Authors and publishers can also add their books to the platform. Users can engage with a book’s world as written, […]
Book Banners Use AI to Expedite Their Efforts
Parent groups have begun using AI to streamline their book banning efforts around the country, creating content that looks like official book reviews to influence government officials to restrict books, 404 Media reports. Blockade uses OpenAI or xAI’s technology to create book reports for conservative “book rating” websites. The tool searches for words the developers have deemed inappropriate and creates a “risk profile” for the book that can then be downloaded and sent to officials to justify book removals. Blockade purposely takes the flagged words out of context and does not explain its ratings. “The script explicitly defines ‘educational inappropriateness’ […]
PRH Germany Sues OpenAI
Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe has filed suit in a Munich court against OpenAI over copyright infringement. The publisher claims that ChatGPT reproduces images and text that are recognizable and in some cases nearly identical to those within Ingo Siegner’s “The Little Dragon Coconut” book series. PRH also says that ChatGPT “proactively suggests ways to create a print-ready manuscript, including copyright-infringing cover art and blurbs, as well as specific instructions for uploading it to self-publishing platforms,” according to a release. “There is clear evidence that Ingo Siegner’s works were unlawfully used to train the AI system and are now stored in […]
New York Times Book Review Cuts Ties With Freelancer Who Used AI
The NYT Book Review has cut ties with novelist and freelance journalist Alex Preston, after discovering that Preston used AI in creating a recent review. The Wrap reports that a reader flagged Preston’s January 6 review of Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, which bore similarities to a Guardian review of the same book. The newspaper launched an investigation of the situation and Preston admitted that he’d used AI and failed to catch the pieces that were pulled from the Guardian. Preston has written six other pieces for the paper since 2021 and he denied used AI on any of […]
Dashverse to Create Short Videos of Harlequin Romances
Harlequin and AI entertainment company Dashverse have partnered to offer short-form drama videos inspired by Harlequin Romance books. The “microdramas” will be “developed by a team of illustrators assisted by Dashverse’s proprietary production system, Frameo,” an “AI-powered creation platform,” a release states. The videos will be available in English and distributed through Dashverse’s DashReels and other platforms. The first of 40 planned adaptations is Catherine Mann’s A Fairy-Tail Ending, available in April. In May, the companies will release JC Harroway’s Forbidden Fiji Nights with Her Rival and Mistletoe Baby Mix-Up, Jackie Ashenden’s Newlywed Enemies, and La Quette’s The King’s Pregnancy Proposition. […]