A roundup of AI news to end the week brings a story that has already whipped up a storm and a story that might well do so. But first, a development in the Gemini legal case I reported on recently. You will recall that publishers have sought to join authors in a copyright case against Google's Gemini.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
At the end of January, Google's lawyers wrote a coruscating response to the attempt of Hachette and Cengage to join the class action, arguing, in effect, that it was too late in the day for them to do so (in less flattering terms). The publishers have argued that not only is their action in plenty of time but it is essential to ensuring that the class in the case gets all the issues properly considered. This, as I noted at the time, has been the proposition of publishers in several recent cases: that not only are they rights holders in their own right but they're the real white knights for all rights holders. We'll see what the courts think.
AI-Generated Romance Novels Proliferate
Meanwhile, authors who use generative AI with abandon have been rattling some cages thanks to an article in the New York Times. The piece talks in depth to Coral Hart (pseudonym), who uses AI to write a novel in under an hour and teaches others how to use prompts to do the same. Hart self-published two hundred novels with fifty thousand sales last year, meaning that no individual novel was a big seller but the cumulative effect was to make her a six-figure income. The piece notes a particular trend for AI-generated novels in the romance genre, home to a host of avid readers.
That story has needless to say caused an outcry in some quarters. One that has slipped under the radar comes from my home institution, the University of Oxford, which has just appointed its first fellow in “Creativity and AI.” The Lau Fellow for Creativity and AI, Refik Anadol, says, “Working with Oxford's extraordinary scholars and the Bodleian Library, I hope to explore how generative AI can become a new form of cultural memory that listens to humanity's past while imagining ethical, poetic futures.”
Interesting times.
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