The publishing industry has had a week of not seeming to be able to get its story straight on AI. I say story, but what I mean in the first instance is AI-generated animated microdramas. Video microdramas have been in the news several times of late. They are very much in demand with audiences and provide an opportunity for those writers who love producing serialized works with short episodes and cliffhangers aplenty.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
Last week, Romance imprint Harlequin threw their hat into the microdrama ring. They announced a partnership with the production company Dashverse to produce a series of forty animated microdramas made for smartphone audiences and based on Harlequin's backlist. The reason this has hit the news can be summed up in this quotation from Dashverse's CEO: “This is a step toward building global entertainment franchises from existing IP, powered by AI.”
Authors Left Out of the Loop
Harlequin insists authors will receive a royalty, but it appears that the authors themselves weren't consulted before the deal was cemented. This is just one of the factors that has led to a less than ecstatic response from the creative world.
It is especially perplexing as it comes at the same time as publishers have joined in filing an amicus brief to support the music industry in a lawsuit against Anthropic. The case is that of Concord Music vs. Anthropic.
The Licensing Argument
Authors and publishers have submitted a brief the substance of which is that licensing arrangements are essential in the new landscape and that using unlicensed copyright material to train systems that then generate other materials is not only fair use but is directly antithetical to the interests of creatives.
It's that last bit that is so interesting: the criticism of AI-generated content competing with human-created content. It is on this subject that the publishing part of our world seems to be having a bit of a moment. Into which category would Harlequin's microdramas fall? Are they supporting authors, or competing with them?
This is, in essence, the quiet part of the complex landscape that many commentators started saying out loud when it was announced that there may have been an extra one million AI-generated titles (self-)published last year.
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