Book publishers are suing AI companies even as there’s growing use of AI at the Big Five book publishing houses, illustrating the crosscurrents at the largest publishers around the transformative technology.
Five publisher organizations, including The Association of American Publishers, the Independent Book Publishers Association, and others have filed an amicus brief in the litigation in which authors, book publishers, and news publishers are asking the court to rule that OpenAI’s training of its large language models on copyrighted content, and Microsoft’s collaboration in that activity, is not fair use, as OpenAI is arguing, but infringement.
Meanwhile, a report released this week on Wired details efforts at Macmillan (parent of First Second and 23rd St. Books) and Penguin Random House (parent of BOOM! Studios, Inklore, and other imprints releasing comic material) to encourage employees to use AI in their work. According to the report, which expands on other Wired reporting earlier this month, employees at all of the Big Five book publishers are saying that they are being encouraged to use AI. Those efforts, according to both reports, are being met with resistance from employees who are finding that AI tools are not useful or oppose them on principle. Book publisher AI use, and lack of transparency about it, is also harming relationships with some bestselling authors, according to the report.
It appears that even while fighting AI companies over whether the works they publish can be used to train the models, book publishers attracted by the opportunity to cut staff and afraid of being left behind by other companies using the technology are at the same time investing in the use of AI. Strange times.
Source: ICv2
