On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway discusses the new deal between OpenAI and Condé Nast, noting that editors and authors were not consulted, sparking concern. He also covers a lawsuit against Anthropic over using pirated works in AI training, highlights Draft2Digital's survey on authors' views about AI, and introduces a blockchain startup called Story, aimed at tracking digital works. Dan wraps up with positive news about rising Kindle Unlimited payouts, signaling a strong outlook for indie authors.
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Listen to Self-Publishing News: OpenAI’s Deal with Condé Nast Sparks Concern
In this week’s Self-Publishing News Podcast, @agnieszkasshoes discusses the new OpenAI deal with Condé Nast, a lawsuit against Anthropic, and rising Kindle Unlimited payouts. #SelfPublishing #AI #KindleUnlimited Share on XDon't Miss an #AskALLi Broadcast
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
Read the Transcripts to Self-Publishing News
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to another Self-Publishing News Podcast from the last week of meteorological summer here in Oxford. A time, of course, beloved of writers and creators everywhere, subject of many coming of age films in particular, American Graffiti, Stand By Me, the like, all playing on the romance of the end of summer. Whereas the actuality is, it's just very gray.
It's a relatively quiet news time, but not that quiet. We have plenty to bring you and I will start with a roundup of various topics around AI.
Condé Nast Strikes Deal with OpenAI
We will take this by starting with the announcement of a deal that has been struck between OpenAI and publishers, Condé Nast.
Condé Nast, obviously, one of the largest magazine and online magazine publishers in the world. They are the umbrella organization behind the likes of The New Yorker and Vogue and Wired, which is really interesting because, of course, Wired is a publication that made the headlines a few months ago by declaring very publicly that it had a “never written by AI policy”. As in all its stories would always be produced by real journalists, real human journalists, which probably makes it all the more valuable as a resource for AI companies, because you won't be getting that situation that is inevitably going to happen at some point, where AI companies are paying for rights to media companies content whose content is produced by the use of AI and so on. You can see the sort of ouroboros happening whereby AI is trained upon itself. That's not going to happen with a publication like Wired.
Anyway, there aren't any details of the amount involved. What is clear though, is that the editors and authors of the content that is actually going to be used to train AI for OpenAI, they have not been involved in the negotiations. That has caused some ill feeling, shall we say, amongst the creative community.
Authors Sue Anthropic Over AI Copyright Infringement
And talking of ill feeling amongst the creative community, the latest case against an AI company has surfaced and that is coming. It's authors who are suing the company Anthropic, and Anthropic is the company behind the Claude large language model. As you would expect, there is an allegation of copyright infringement.
It's a slightly interesting case because the allegation is that Anthropic trained Claude using pirated copies of these authors works. This, as I pointed out in my column, feels like it's going to leave the legal situation slightly unclear.
Obviously, using pirated copies is clear; it's clearly illegal to use pirated copies for certain things, although not necessarily as clear as it is wrong to pirate copies. So, that's something I've talked about in the past that actually, piracy is clearly legally wrong but what you do with already pirated copies, that's less clear legally.
If Anthropic is found guilty, it's not clear to me necessarily what it will be found guilty of and how useful that will be as a precedent.
Ideally, if they had bought copies of books and then used them as AI and then were found guilty of copyright infringement, for creatives who want to make a legal case, that would be a much more useful precedent. Anyway, we will see what happens.
Draft2Digital Launch AI Rights Licensing Survey
But to round out that set of topics around the use of our work to train AI and licensing of that work, a la the Condé Nast deal, Draft2Digital, one of the largest and most popular platforms for indie authors to use to distribute our works, are asking for people to complete a survey.
They want to know what we as authors think of various things around AI. They've made it very clear. There has been some speculation. They have made it very clear they don't have an agenda. They don't necessarily intend to do one thing or another, and it's not as though they have said that they have already been approached by companies who want to use Draft2Digital books to train an AI.
Instead, what they are trying to do is to understand what their authors think in case they are ever approached, so that they are able to produce a response which reflects the opinions of their authors. That seems to me to be an eminently worthy goal.
It's a survey I'll be filling out. I don't see any harm in others doing likewise.
If you have strong opinions, it may actually be a very helpful thing to do, and it would be lovely to know from them what the results are. Apart from anything else, it's going to be really interesting data because they're asking some really interesting questions.
They are asking, for example, about money, and what they're asking about money is, based on a 75,000-word book, what would you consider granting licensing rights for? What level of payment? And it's all sorts of amounts from a few cents up to thousands of dollars, up to, obviously, never.
They want to get a sense of whether there is a line somewhere where authors say, I'm willing to grant a license to my work for this amount, but nothing less than this, or whether actually it really is a line in the sand that people won't cross.
So, it's that sort of pragmatism versus activism, and actually putting a number on that, which I think is a really interesting question to ask.
They are also asking about both the legal and the moral views of authors, which again is a very interesting way of putting it. We know lots of authors think it's wrong for large language models to train their AIs on author's work, in particular without consent. But in general, we think we know that people think it is wrong in principle. We also know that there are legal cases being brought, as we just talked about. It's less clear to me, certainly, whether a lot of authors actually draw the distinction in their heads between saying this is illegal, or this is wrong, or I think it's both illegal and wrong, or I think it's illegal, but I'm not that unhappy about it, or indeed, what seems to me to be the most common, which is, I would like it to be illegal because I think it's wrong, I'm not sure whether it is.
So, that's really interesting, to get that differentiation of opinion between people who think something is legal but wrong and people who think that it's illegal and wrong, and every other combination thereof.
So, it's going to make a really interesting set of data, so do think about getting involved with filling the survey out if you have been asked.
What else has been in the news this week?
New Startup Suggests Using Blockchain to Solve Problem of AI
A really interesting new startup. It's a startup called Story. That's an original name, if ever there was. When I saw it, it amazed me that was a name that was still up for grabs, but clearly no one has had the chutzpah to call their startup just Story.
We talked about ouroboros earlier, and this is a classic example of that, it really is a tech will eat itself moment, and this is a company who is trying to solve the problem of AI by using blockchain.
Their idea is that by having your book distributed digitally through a platform that sits on the blockchain, you are able to trace the use of those files, and by being able to trace the use of those files, because blockchain technology, one of the things that actually is good for is tracing stuff and seeing what happens to a file because you can't do anything to a file without that activity appearing on a blockchain and there being a written record of it in the blockchain, you can keep track of anyone who's using your work to train AI, because they can't do anything with your work without that appearing in the blockchain.
So, in theory, it's a way of keeping tabs to make sure that people don't use your work for AI without permission. If they then argue that they haven't used it, you can actually point and say, but it's here, that's proof that you did, and if there is money to be handed out, there will be a clear record of the people to whom that money should be handed out.
That's lots of stories about AI.
Kindle Unlimited Money Pot Sees 10% Increase
Some interesting news that's not about AI, Mark Williams loves to talk about Kindle Unlimited, and in particular to say just how much money is given to authors through Kindle Unlimited. He has a very interesting post following the amount of money that's been in the pot each July for the last three years, and basically there's been a 10% increase year on year. The 10% increase from 22 to 23, going up from $45 million to $49.5 million, and it's gone up again 10% this year. So, payout in July, $55.5 million, and he says this means Kindle Unlimited is due to give self-publishing authors $635 million this year. That is obviously a huge amount and it's an amount that goes unreported.
So, we've got more official figures showing that sales are going down apparently this time, year on year, but again there is a reminder that things like Kindle Unlimited don't get counted when we talk about book sales, and they really should do because they are payments to authors for readers who read the books, and they are quite sizable and they are going up. So, all is not lost in the world of indie publishing and the payments that we can expect from it.
So, it's not just that we are having all of our income eaten by AI. Actually, the future looks quite bright, which as we stand on the cusp of autumn and all that implies, literally and metaphorically, indeed feels like a very positive note on which to end.
Very much look forward to speaking to you next week, the first week in September.
Until then, have a lovely end of August.
Thank you.
