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Poetry Can Bypass AI

News Summary: New Study Shows Poetry Can Bypass AI Guardrails; Character AI Shifts Its Teen Strategy

Authoritarian governments—and commentators on Lord Byron alike—have long suspected poets might be the most dangerous people in society. Indeed, one of my favorite novels, Bolaño’s doorstop The Savage Detectives, has this fear at its heart. A new study has discovered there might be something in that after all. The paper, catchily titled “Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak in Large Language Models (LLMs),” can essentially be summed up by saying, “AI will teach you how to do naughty things if you ask it in poetry.”
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OverDrive Sues OpenAI

News Summary: OverDrive Sues OpenAI over ‘Sora,’ Spotify Plans Price Hike, and Speakies Debut

We’re used to AI-related lawsuits. And we’re used to those lawsuits being about copyright. And the first story today ticks those boxes, but not in the way you might expect. OpenAI is on the receiving end, as it often is. But the litigant is the distributor of digital resources to libraries, OverDrive, familiar to many of us as the platform through which indies are able to get our works into the library system.
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Tertulia

News Summary: New Tools from Tertulia and a Social Platform for Small Reading Groups

We start the week with a round-up of interesting new platforms and tools. And we begin with an expanded offering from one of ALLi’s partners, Tertulia (note to self as a theologian who spent a term studying the patristic author Tertullian, that there is but one “l”). Tertulia started life and continues to thrive as an online bookstore designed to be run differently.
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Beehiiv Unveils New AI Marketing Tools

News Summary: Beehiiv Unveils New AI Marketing Tools; Experts Trace How Discovery and Promotion Are Rapidly Changing

I have come across several fascinating pieces on the changing shape of marketing for indie authors over the past week. The news item that frames them picks up on Tuesday’s theme of new tools, with some more AI gizmos courtesy of newsletter platform Beehiiv (ironically, the announcement comes a week after I finally signed up to have my newsletter with them).
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ALLi To Host Webinar

News Summary: ALLi to Host Webinar Helping Authors Understand the Anthropic AI Settlement

You will have heard a lot in this column and elsewhere about the Anthropic AI settlement. In my last report, I noted that there were still more than 200,000 titles eligible to be part of the class action whose authors had not yet come forward to join. Part of the judge’s concern in the case was that more authors be made aware of how to state an interest.
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Alliance Of Independent Authors | Self-Publishing News November 6, 2025 | With Dan Holloway

News Summary: $50M Literary Arts Fund to Support Writers; Bluesky Surpasses 40M Users and Adds Dislike Feature

Like many stories as they first break, I don’t have full details of what a major new $50 million initiative will actually offer. But the Literary Arts Fund has committed to giving that much money to nonprofit organizations that directly support writers and creators by 2031. I wanted to report on the initiative now because the first call for grant applications is due to open next Monday, November 10. So mark the date in your diary and be sure to visit the site then to see exactly what the eligibility terms and the nature and size of the grants will be.
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