Last weekend I had a little stagefright before I was set to appear on a panel about authorship and AI for an event called Whose Truth? Writers and Readers Forum presented by the Authors Guild.
I had a feeling I’d get a lot of questions from the audience that I wouldn’t be able to answer, and I hate not being able to answer questions. I was prepared to say “I don’t know” quite often. That’s just the nature of talking about AI these days, when even the most passionate AI champions don’t quite know what the technology might do, and the rest of us rubes are left to try to make sense of it.
But as I sat in on the panel before mine, called Writing About Real People, I was struck by how much time the panelists spent discussing the need to secure permissions for song lyrics or quotes from films to include in their books. Publishers have always been extra careful about not violating fair use laws—they tend to err on the side of caution to avoid lawsuits from other media companies. If you’re writing a biography of a singer, you can use maybe a line or two of their songbook in you work, but very rarely any more.
As I began my panel it occurred to me, amid questions about how AI changes our art and our brains and our natural world and our livelihoods, that we suddenly live in a time when the tech bros have officially declared themselves entitled to all books claiming transformative fair use. Our books belong to them now. The “shut up and let this happen” of it all could give you whiplash.
I’ve thought a lot about fair use in my career. For my first book, Slaughterhouse 90210, which was a silly Tumblr-turned-coffee table book, Macmillan’s legal team had decided that using screen shots from TV shows was not kosher for the printed page. I would have to go through the proper channels to secure permissions for what was once a real DIY kind of project. I ultimately spent about $50,000, purchasing all photos through Getty or other photo agencies and painstakingly deciding how much an image is worth.
[pullquotes]It feels as though publishers, at least the people in the C-suites, have already given up, deferring to tech companies with barely a whimper, let alone a bang.[/pullquotes]
Now generative AI companies are eating up entire industries by claiming that their blatant pirating of copyrighted materials to train large language models counts as fair use. They tell us that such LLM training counts as “reading” and not stealing, even though recently unsealed files show that Open AI knew this would hurt authors. Of course they knew! This is apparently perfectly fine with the US justice system. Thank goodness the Authors Guild is taking action to fight back against AI, but the Big Five publishers are doing less so.
For decades Amazon’s monopoly of the publishing industry has been a regular topic of conversation amongst publishers even as the US government—even under Democrats—has refused to open an antitrust investigation against the $2.8 trillion company. Now Amazon has major investments in Anthropic and Open AI and seems poised to decimate a variety of creative industries with very little pushback.
It feels as though publishers, at least the people in the C-suites, have already given up, deferring to tech companies with barely a whimper, let alone a bang. Last week Adam Morgan reported for WIRED that three major book publishers are using AI to create marketing and jacket copy and jacket art, among other things. It is impossible for publishers to stand against AI in a few lawsuits on the one hand, and on the other to devalue the work of its own employees and invest in AI software on the other. All this despite knowing that the usage of AI is posing all sorts of existential problems for the industry. How awful it is to watch major publishers spending much more time thinking about how to incorporate AI into their workflows rather than trying to exorcise it.
How terribly frustrating that publishers don’t recognize that we are all underdogs in the fight against an AI takeover. We can hope that the Midterm elections will bring some more government oversight of AI, but depending on the government to save us is a mistake given how mainstream Dems are also very much beholden to Big Tech. There are so many uncertainties about how AI will affect our future, but I know for sure that in the meantime too many businesses are caving to the AI overlords with barely a fight. Workers deserve better.