The Jerusalem International Book Forum held its annual reunion breakfast on Thursday at Villa Bonn in Frankfurt, an emotional scene this year, in light of the developing situation in the Middle East. The JIBF organizers themselves were unable to attend, and Zoomed in from their homes, making remarks that caused people in the audience–a high-powered crowd including editors and executives from the corporate publishers and bigger US indies–to tear up. The event honors past fellows of the Zev Birger Editorial Fellowship sponsored by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which brings book professionals to the JIBF for networking and development. Production coordinator Sharon […]
AI
Springer Nature Announces AI Writing Assistant
Springer Nature has announced Curie, an in-house AI-powered writing assistant that aids researchers–especially those whose first language is not English–in writing academic papers. Curie is an “evolution” of Springer’s digital editing and translation services, managed by the company’s author services arm, AJE. According to a release, the tool “has been specifically trained on academic literature, spanning 447+ areas of study, more than 2,000 field-specific topics and on over 1 million edits on papers published including those in leading Nature journals. It combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with specialized AI digital editing developed in-house and designed specifically for […]
Authors Respond to OpenAI’s Defense
Attorneys for authors Paul Tremblay, Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey have filed a new brief in their lawsuit against OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, refuting the company’s initial defense. Last month OpenAI moved to dismiss the plaintiffs’ “ancillary” claims, hoping to focus on the core question of copyright infringement. In response, the plaintiffs ask the court to dismiss the motion, and “challenge OpenAI’s position that it should be allowed to train its generative AI products using anyone’s name and copyrighted literary works, without consent, for free, forever.” “In this case, the copyrighted works of a class of millions […]
Yes, AI Was Trained on Your Book
Having already assured readers that a significant body of copyrighted books were used without permission to train large language models as part of the corpus researchers call Books3, the Atlantic is now ready to collect your rage clicks with a searchable database of those titles. “Since my article appeared, I’ve heard from several authors wanting to know if their work is in Books3. In almost all cases, the answer has been yes.” They tabulated 206 works by Nora Roberts; 133 from Danielle Steel; and only 121 by James Patterson. Amusingly, the publication also wants us to know that a long […]
Project Gutenberg Refines Automated Audiobook Creation
Project Gutenberg has converted approximately 5,000 book files into audiobooks using synthetic voice. Working in concert with MIT and Microsoft, the project aimed to refine producing machine-generated audio conversions at scale. The researchers write: “Our system uses new advances in neural text-to-speech, emotion recognition, custom voice cloning, and distributed computing to create engaging and lifelike audiobooks…. We believe that this work has the potential to greatly improve the accessibility and availability of audiobooks.” In a paper on the project, they explain: “Different audiobooks require different reading styles. Nonfiction works benefit from a clear and neutral voice while fictional works with […]
Publishers Test AI Tools for In-House Processes
Recent news and lawsuits have discussed the use of artificial intelligence with regard to creative work—whether AI-produced work can be copyrighted (it can’t) and if using books to train machine learning is a copyright violation. Much of the conversation within the industry is focused on contract language, where agents and authors are hoping to limit the use of AI without permission and block any training on their material, while publishers are trying to retain flexibility for the future and not make promises they can’t fulfill. Quieter perhaps is how publishing companies are using the technology in their day-to-day operations, and […]