It’s been a week or so since we had news of a new survey. As this is an AI-related survey, it also provides the opportunity to roll our AI stories for the week into a single column (assuming, of course, nothing else breaks in the next few days. Which is, I’ll admit, a big assumption).
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
The Gotham Ghostwriters and Bernoff.com “AI and the Writing Profession Survey 2026” is the second edition of this particular survey. This always makes this kind of thing slightly more meaningful because the results will at least give the first tentative indications of trends or directions of travel.
AI Users and Nonusers See the Technology Very Differently
If you want to read the results of the first survey, you can do so here. There were some interesting takeaways from that survey (though it will be the change over the past year that is most interesting of all). The thing the report itself puts the spotlight on is what it calls “a deep attitudinal divide . . . between AI users and nonusers.” To take one example, of the 61 percent of writers surveyed who said they used AI, 92 percent said it made them more productive, and well over half (59 percent) thought it raised the quality of their work. Meanwhile, of the nonusers, a mere 3 percent “feel that AI is a positive force for the profession.” That is, indeed, a deep attitudinal divide!
You can take part in the 2026 survey here.
Justice Department Backs Fair Use for AI Training
And the other AI news comes from the US and a move that could potentially affect the legal landscape for litigation in copyright cases on that side of the Atlantic. As usual, it comes with all kinds of caveats about my lack of expertise in US law and the ins and outs of the judicial process. The intervention in question comes in the case of The New York Times against OpenAI. The Department of Justice has issued a “Statement of Interest” relating to the case.
In it, they argued that the use of copyrighted material for training AI large language models should be considered fair use. The rationale is twofold. First is the claim, which we have seen made in some of the rulings in past cases, that the use of such material by LLMs is transformative. Second addresses the question of market dilution, which was put in the spotlight by Tuhin Chakrabarty’s recent paper. The argument here is that it is not the publishing market that’s in danger but the tech market, with the requirement to pay a licensing fee for copyrighted material leaving US-based tech firms at a global disadvantage.
This is, of course, just a “Statement of Interest,” but the response of the courts will be followed with interest.
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