This summer, The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) surveyed more than 13,500 writers asking for their opinions and worries about AI licensing deals. This week, the organization, which is best known for collecting fees on behalf of authors for books lent out by libraries, published the findings in a forty-page report.
ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
AI’s Impact on Writers and Hardship Grants
Before I dive into the findings, I will connect the dots to another story from this week. The Royal Literary Fund is a charity that supports writers in the UK who are struggling to make ends meet (sadly, they are not open for applications by indie authors, which is why I haven’t covered them before in this column). They report a fourfold increase in applications for hardship grants this year and cite the impact of AI as one direct cause for this rise.
Key Findings from the Brave New World Report
So back to Brave New World (the report’s name, not my assignation). And it makes interesting reading. Seventy-one percent of those surveyed (almost 10,000 writers) said they were concerned about the use of their work to train AI, with only 8 percent unconcerned. That feels in line with other similar surveys.
The figure that raised my eyebrows was the assertion that only 9 percent of those surveyed had, in a phrase torturously reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s famous marijuana comments, “knowingly used AI tools.” That is very much not in line with other surveys, which show widespread use.
Sadly, the single question on the subject is somewhat fuzzy and may not have drawn the usual distinction between assistive AI tools that are widely used and generative AI that is less so among writers.
But the really interesting information is about attitudes to licensing. Now, obviously, there is self-selection of sorts here. ALCS collects fees under license as its day job, so authors who take part in the survey will be interested in such things. But still, half of respondents would support licensing agreements.
This comes in a context where more than 90 percent of writers would expect compensation if their work was used to train AI, over 80 percent would want to be part of a licensing agreement if one were secured (presumably including many who are being pragmatic although they don’t really want licensing by preference), and three-quarters would expect to be given the option to opt out.
And really interestingly, twenty times (yes, you read that right: 81 percent to 4 percent) more people said they would trust ALCS with a licensing agreement than would trust their publisher. That, for me, is the standout figure of the whole piece, and the one I’ll leave you with because it says so much about the parlous state of writers’ trust in the establishment that should exist to serve them.
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