If your goal is to make a bunch of authors exceedingly angry with you, I honestly can’t think of many better ways than asking them to sell their work to train AI. And yet, that’s what publishing company HarperCollins has started doing with its authors, as exposed by writer and comedian Daniel Kibblesmith in a post on Bluesky late last week.
“Abominable,” Kibblesmith wrote, sharing screenshots of the correspondence between himself and his agent about the deal. The publisher was interested in including his 2017 children’s book Santa’s Husband and was willing to pay a non-negotiable sum of $2,500 to license his book for three years in order to train an AI language learning model.
The A.V. Club reported on the incident last week. 404 Media then reached out to HarperCollins on Monday for the publisher’s side of the story and received this response:
HarperCollins has reached an agreement with an artificial intelligence technology company to allow limited use of select nonfiction backlist titles for training AI models to improve model quality and performance. While we believe this deal is attractive, we respect the various views of our authors, and they have the choice to opt in to the agreement or to pass on the opportunity.
HarperCollins has a long history of innovation and experimentation with new business models. Part of our role is to present authors with opportunities for their consideration while simultaneously protecting the underlying value of their works and our shared revenue and royalty streams. This agreement, with its limited scope and clear guardrails around model output that respects author’s rights, does that.
On the one hand, the fact that HarperCollins is giving the authors the ability to opt-out at all is encouraging. Given how much money is presumably at stake, the publisher might have chosen to bully authors into taking the deal instead of asking for permission. On the other hand, it’s a bit hard to imagine many authors taking HarperCollins up on the deal and potentially contributing to their own obsolescence, especially for the paltry payday of $2,500 per title.
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“It seems like they think they’re cooked, and they’re chasing short money while they can,” said Kibblesmith to A.V. Club. “I disagree. The fear of robots replacing authors is a false binary. I see it as the beginning of two diverging markets, readers who want to connect with other humans across time and space, or readers who are satisfied with a customized on-demand content pellet fed to them by the big computer so they never have to be challenged again.”
Needless to say, Kibblesmith did not agree to the terms. That said, not every author is willing or able to take a moral stand, especially if $2,500 or more could help pay the bills.
