On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway covers the launch of Created by Humans, an AI rights licensing platform, and the Copyright Clearance Centre's new initiative to include AI permissions in their annual copyright licenses. Dan also discusses the expansion of the Amazon Literary Partnership into Ireland, highlighting its support for a range of literary organizations and the opportunities for authors to apply for the 2025 grants.
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Listen to Self-Publishing News: Created by Humans
On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, @agnieszkasshoes covers the launch of Created by Humans, an AI rights licensing platform. 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 from an Oxford where it still hasn't quite reached summer yet. Although, you would never know that from the hordes who have descended upon the place as always, keen to enjoy our finest architecture and of course literary celebrity, including such delights as the C. S. Lewis Nature Reserve, and the Tolkien House, and obviously many Harry Potter tours, and so on.
This week and next week, I apologize in advance, they will be short but sweet, as I am at the point of maximum organization for my upcoming father's funeral, which I'm organizing on my own at long distance, and learning all kinds of things about lawyers, about services, about crematoriums and funeral directors, and all kinds of things. That is taking a huge amount of my time at the moment, so I apologize that I am not able to give you my full attention, but I will nonetheless give you some.
New AI Models Show How Creators and Tech Companies Might Work Together
I will start, needless to say, with some AI. In the UK, of course, people have been noting the fact that the King's Speech, which is where new governments set out their legislation, didn't actually, despite various things that were predicted, say anything specific about AI. So, we have yet to see what the new government is going to do about that.
But what has been interesting in the last week is the fact that we have had some stories that feel like they come from a sector that is maturing, or at least having to deal with the reality of the fact that it's not going away, or at least it's not going away anytime soon, and therefore there has to be a certain pragmatism to the extent that tech firms on the one hand, creators on the other, have to work with each other somehow.
So, we've had two interesting models of how this might work this week. Both of them have explicitly used the language of seeking to build bridges to bring creators and tech together, and have made statements stating that they believe that you can be pro-creativity, pro-copyright and pro-AI all in one.
This is what they are attempting to do in order to demonstrate that, and the first of these is something called Created by Humans. This is a platform that has amongst its co-founders some very high-profile people who span the tech and creative worlds, specifically the tech and writing worlds. So, we have Trip Adler, who has for a long time been CEO of Scribd, which many of you will know is the subscription eBook platform, which has been going for a long time, and is one of those that for many years it was a sort of an ongoing joke as, how come Scribd's still here? They seem to have been doing nothing and yet they still seem to exist, and they still seem to exist. They do what they do, they are a subscription-based platform. They pioneered the subscription model in many ways.
But anyway, Trip Adler has now moved on to this thing, Created by Humans, and very interestingly, alongside him we have a writer, but a very specific writer, and that is Walter Isaacson, who is known for his biographies. He's written biographies, amongst others, of Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, the inventor of the CRISPR DNA technology, Jennifer Doudna, but most important and most relevant to this, of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. So, clearly, he is a writer who is fascinated by the world of tech and in particular the world of a certain kind of Silicon Valley, friendly, very in your face, and progressive technology that has a certain amount of self-confidence.
So, what is Created by Humans actually going to do? It is an AI rights licensing platform. That is to say, it is a platform that enables creators to sell licenses for their work to AI companies to use to train their platforms on.
I think as I put in the column, we know that the big AI platforms are doing big deals with publishers, they haven't necessarily at the moment got time to do deals individually with indie authors or even smaller publishers. This feels like a platform that wants to take advantage of that, saying, if you want to be part of this scene that's happening at the moment where AI firms are willing to pay people for right to use their work to train AI, we will facilitate that. What people think about this remains to be seen.
Another project that has come on board recently is from the Copyright Clearance Centre, and this is something that they are doing, they are bundling in AI rights with their annual copyright license. This is what they sell to institutions to enable them to use copyright material in the course of their work, and now one of the things they will be able to use in the course of their work is copyright material for AI, if people sign up for their program.
It feels in both of these cases that this is a move towards seeing AI rights as another form of rights that people own in their work, alongside translation rights, film and TV rights, territory rights, or format rights.
Who knows whether it will actually gain traction, but it's a very interesting development.
Amazon Literary Partnership Expands Into Ireland
That brings us from AI to more obvious and more grassroots support for authors, and this week we have seen the announcement of the new recipients, 2024 recipients, of the Amazon Literary Partnership. So, this is a scheme whereby Amazon offers grants to literary organizations, large and small, to help them carry out work to bring writing to a wider audience.
This is in the news in particular because, having started in America, for the last five years it's been going in the UK, and this year for the first time it has expanded to Ireland and has backed a couple of Irish groups, including Fighting Words, who are setting up a new young people's writing club.
It goes from everything, from on the one hand, it's got really quite official organizations like Arvon, which obviously organizes creative writing workshops for hundreds and thousands of people to very small, very community focused things.
It's something worth keeping an eye on because they look at organizations that are new and old as well as big and small. If you have an idea for a project that you think would be of interest and might benefit from funding and you don't know where to look, the 2025 funding round will start towards the end of this calendar year. Keep an eye out for that.
Do go and look at the kind of organizations that get given awards in the links I've put in the column. I will of course update you when the time comes when those nominations and applications open for 2025.
In the meanwhile, I wish you all well and look forward to speaking to you again next week. Thank you.
Thanks for the information. Even though the odds of using AI in my n-f history writing is low at this time, I’m glad to hear news and updates about it. I’m sorry, I can’t tell which person’s father recently passed. Was it Dan Halloway? Please accept my sympathy.