Court cases around the use of books and journalism to train AI are back in the news, with AI book licensing emerging as a key issue.
ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
Far and away the most interesting piece on the subject I have seen so far came this week from a case involving Meta. Court transcripts show that the company stopped pursuing discussion of AI rights with publishers back in 2023. The cessation of discussion itself isn’t the interesting part. For me, it was a combination of the timing and the reason that caught my attention.
Meta’s Abandoned AI Negotiations
It seems Meta had been cold-calling publishers as part of a program to see if it could gain access to books to train its AI. It got a very low response rate. But most interestingly, it seems that responses it did receive indicated that publishers of fiction in particular did not have the rights they would have needed to make the discussions meaningful. They would have had to go back and negotiate those rights with their authors before coming back to the table.
It’s not really my remit to speculate. I will simply point out the choreography here: that large-scale discussions of AI rights initiated by a tech company seem to have predated much of the really widespread discussion in the publishing industry of those rights.
AI Lawsuits and the Ongoing Debate
Back in more same-old news, a new lawsuit from publishers of news content has AI startup Cohere in its sights. It alleges loss of ad revenue from the site’s aggregation of stories in its own environment without linking out to the places those stories originate. It does, though, credit those sources, and it’s that which leads to the feature of the story that made me deem it newsworthy.
Because the publishers are also suing Cohere for damage to their trademarks. They allege the company’s AI is hallucinating content it then attributes to reputable outlets that, in fact, said nothing of the sort, damaging their reputation as reliable reporters.
This comes as publishers criticize the outcome of the Paris AI Summit that I reported on last week. As I noted at the time, the statement (itself not signed by two key players, the UK and US) failed to promote the issue of creators’ rights to the level of key global priority, contenting itself with a few noises in the “also” section.
Thoughts or further questions on this post or any self-publishing issue?
If you’re an ALLi member, head over to the SelfPubConnect forum for support from our experienced community of indie authors, advisors, and our own ALLi team. Simply create an account (if you haven’t already) to request to join the forum and get going.
Non-members looking for more information can search our extensive archive of blog posts and podcast episodes packed with tips and advice at ALLi's Self-Publishing Advice Center.
