On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway discusses the new COPIED Act, which aims to provide copyright protection for creators in the AI age. This bipartisan bill, introduced in the United States, seeks to ensure that creators can tag their work with metadata to prevent unauthorized use by AI for training purposes. Dan also touches on the implications of AI on creativity, referencing a recent study that highlights the balance between individual originality and collective diversity.
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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: COPIED Act
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to another Self-Publishing News podcast from a very wet and thundery Oxford, or thunder at least is forecast. I can see grey skies and teeming rain outside the window, so I apologise if the background noise gets too much or if indeed, I go off air because of electrical interference, which we all love.
This, of course, is the kind of weather that we always associate with this time of year because, of course, in the UK, it's Wimbledon, or it has been Wimbledon. There has been a lot of sport going on this last week that no doubt those of you with any friends in the UK will have noticed, and indeed globally. So, we've had Wimbledon, we've had the final of the European football, but most of all I have been absolutely glued to a fascinating Tour de France, which has another week to go.
There is some more relevance to that, not necessarily to the news, but just that it has made me think, as I have been reading up on things in advance similar, fascinating endurance sport, it made me realize again, just how many really great, well-written books there are about sport. So, something to think about for all writers out there as you are watching the goings on; there is a really large market for books about sport. There are a lot of really well written books about sport. So, get your writing shoes on.
2024 Kindle Storyteller Awards Now Open for Entry
Sadly, one of the things you won't be able to do, were you to write such a book, is enter the Kindle Storyteller Awards. These have launched for this for this year. It's a UK-based award. It has a £20,000 first prize. It's a very large award, and it is for the best book published on KDP Select, or enrolled in KDP Select, at least for the period of eligible entry, which runs out at the end of August, but it is for fiction. There we go, no sporting books, but a reminder that it's really worth entering.
This year's judges will be Sara Cox, someone that is very well known to my generation. I believe she is still very popular amongst the young people, doing radio and music, was certainly a figure who featured largely in the music listening life of student me back in the 1990s.
But a reminder for those of you entering Kindle Storyteller awards that, like the Vellys, which I talked about a week or so ago, this is a two-stage process. So yes, indeed, the winner is decided by a human and high-profile judge, but in order to get your manuscript in front of that judge, you have to jump through certain hoops. Those hoops, of course, are all about how many people read the book while it's on Amazon, how many people buy it, how many people review it, and so on.
So, there is an element of popularity contest as well as an element of quality contest. So, do bear that in mind if you are thinking about entering, and plan accordingly.
U.S. Bill Launched to Protect Copyright Creators from AI
It's also been a really interesting week in AI. We haven't talked about AI for a little while, but it's come back with a vengeance.
We'll start with a discreet, simple story, and that's the launch in the U.S. of a bill that seeks to protect copyright creators.
So, this is very welcome news for many that actually, we are used to seeing legislation that's there to protect technology, we're used to seeing things are from Europe that protect creators. Now, we've got something, it's a bipartisan bill in the U.S., and they have done what bills in the U.S. seem to do really well, which is to use acronyms. I remember on similar subjects of copyright and piracy and plagiarism and so on, SOPA PIPA, back in the day, in the days when Aaron Schwartz was campaigning on such things.
This is goes by the acronym of COPIED. How appropriate. The COPIED Act, which stands for Content, Origin, Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deep Faked Media Act, which is slightly less catchy than COPIED.
It's an attempt to ensure that people's work is only used for the things they want it to be used for, and one of the key provisions in it is that it will require platforms, where content is made available to AI, to allow creators to tag their work with metadata in such a way that any AI that does find that material will not be able to use it and will not be able to incorporate it in its training models.
So, that's potentially a very interesting development and good to see that the debate is maturing.
New Study Highlights Impact of Generative AI on Creativity
But one of the debates that's new is something that's been covered by a fascinating piece of research that has been undertaken in the universities of Exeter and University College London.
I am going to call up the article now and see if it's got as catchy a title as COPIED Act. Not quite, it seems the title of the article by Anil Doshi and Oliver Hauser is, Generative AI Enhances Individual Creativity but Reduces the Collective Diversity of Novel Content, which does a very good job of explaining what the experiment shows, even if not a very catchy job. You might suggest that they might have used AI to say, here's the title we want, can you come up with a catchy, snappy version of it?
So, a fascinating piece of research, as I say. What they looked at was writers who used AI, had their creativity impacted. They gave some writers access to generative AI tools to help them provide them, not with the actual writing, but with brainstorming.
You will remember from the Society of Authors survey on how authors are using generative AI, that actually while there is a lot of scepticism about using it to do your actual writing, nonetheless, one of the uses that people do seem happy to put it to, by and large, is brainstorming. Coming up with ideas for stories or settings for characters, or potential character weaknesses or character arcs, or help with world building. This kind of stuff that you might spend time struggling with a blank page for otherwise. So, it's a way of, of brainstorming ideas.
So, they gave some writers access to generative AI to help them do that, and other writers, they gave their blank screen or empty page and got them to write as normal, as they would have done two years ago when there was no generative AI for people to have access to, and what they found was really interesting and has some really quite far reaching implications.
What they found was that, for every individual writer who used the AI tools, their writing seems to get more original, which is really interesting and really suggests that there is an incentive for people to, as you'll see in the more pro-AI circles, to work as a partnership. Humans do what humans do best, let machines do what machines do best. Put the two together and you have this sort of superpower that will help people to reach their potential. So, using AI as a tool to help people flourish and to do what they were going to do anyway, but do it better. So, it seems to lend credence to that as being a way of proceeding.
But when they stepped back and looked at the whole pool of writers, what they found was that basically it was all the same. That's a very simplistic way of putting it, but the group became more homogenous. That is, at the micro level, it looks like there is more originality, you step back at the macro level and they're all being original in the same way.
So, as someone who teaches creative thinking, this is something I'm very familiar with. I give people creative thinking exercises; it's really fascinating to watch the way in which individual people come up with things they'd never have thought of before. But within groups, there can be this sort of pull to the center, and then obviously I try and help people to pull out of that center and find techniques to, to de-center, as I call it. That de-centering seems not to be there, because obviously the generative AI is giving everyone the same ideas, is the conclusion you might reach.
If you want a more diverse literary landscape, then having each individual author using generative AI to brainstorm might not be the way to do it, even though from the perspective of the individual authors, it's a really good way to produce more original content.
That is a brilliantly written abstract, and I will quote from it, the abstract of the article. “We find that access to generative AI ideas causes stories to be evaluated as more creative, better written, and more enjoyable, especially amongst less creative writers.”
So, that's another interesting point.
“However, generative AI enabled stories are more similar to each other than stories by humans alone. These results point to an increase in individual creativity at the risk of losing collective novelty.”
And as they then go on to say, “this dynamic resembles a social dilemma. With generative idea AI, writers are individually better off, but collectively a narrower scope of novel content is produced.”
So, there we go, we actually have a big social problem, and as a community and as an industry, it faces us with a really interesting conversation, because there will be, as game theorists will be familiar, there will be competing payoffs. There will be individual payoffs and there will be social payoffs, or community wide payoffs, and sometimes the community wide payoff requires a decreased payout at individual level and vice versa.
Getting authors and industries to see the balance between those two is going to be a fascinating thing, especially when we have the tech industry breathing down our neck, pushing us in one very particular direction, although it itself has its own different payoffs.
I found this absolutely fascinating. I would highly recommend everyone to go and read the article and then do some really deep thinking about your own practice and the practice of your community based on it, because that level of thinking is not going to do you any harm, it can only help to make us all more thoughtful, more reflective, and possibly, dare I say it, more creative, which is indeed a great spot to end.
I look forward very much to speaking to you again next week, when hopefully it won't be as thundery. Thank you.
