As we have noted recently, the various AI companies (and their backers) have dutifully filed comments with the US Copyright Office explaining why they believe training their systems on copyrighted work is fair use and “just math.” So it’s notable that vice president of audio at Stability AI Ed Newton-Rex left the company recently and made clear at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit he believes those arguments are wrong. (He oversaw their music creation product, Stability Audio.) He resigned “because I don’t agree with the company’s opinion that training generative AI models on copyrighted works is ‘fair use’.” As he […]
Washington Post Best of the Year
December Library Reads
Big Opening for IRON FLAME
Despite the issues over misprints, Rebecca Yarros’s much-anticipated IRON FLAME sold approximately 585,000 hardcovers in its first week on sale at outlets tracked by Circana Bookscan. A new-release limited “special edition” of her earlier book, FOURTH WING, sold approximately 271,000 hardcovers, giving Yarros the top two positions on Bookscan’s charts. Meanwhile, as usual be wary of simplistic proclamations about the marketplace. Yarros lifted print sales for the week ending November 11 to 4 percent above the same week last year — and measured print sales have been ahead of the same weeks in 2022 for five of the last seven […]
People 11/16
Finalists Call for Middle East Ceasefire at National Book Awards
Justin Torres’s Blackouts won the National Book Award for Fiction at the 74th annual ceremony on Wednesday night. He kept his personal remarks short, as a group of finalists came to the stage to read a collective statement about the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. “On behalf of the finalists, we oppose the ongoing bombardment of Gaza and call for the humanitarian ceasefire to address the urgent humanitarian needs of Palestinian civilians, particularly children,” nominee Aaliyah Bilal read. “We oppose antisemitism and anti-Palestinian sentiment and Islamophobia, equally, accepting the human dignity of all parties, knowing that further bloodshed, does nothing to secure […]