On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway reports that National Novel Writing Month, known as NaNoWriMo, has announced it will not officially take place this November, citing financial and reputational concerns. He also covers the latest in AI and copyright, including the consolidation of major lawsuits against tech companies, protests outside Meta’s London offices, and new research suggesting copyrighted materials have been used to train AI models. Finally, he discusses Amazon’s new AI-powered Kindle Recap feature and questions around whether authors have consented to its use.
Listen to the Podcast: NaNoWriMo Shuts Down, AI Lawsuits Consolidated
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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
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to the self-publishing news.
After the disappearance last week from the high streets of Book Retailer of the Year, of the past, WHSmith, another great institution of the literary world is disappearing this month, or not necessarily disappearing this month, but has this month announced its disappearance.
That, of course, is NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, which takes place every November, but will not be taking place, at least officially, this November. This of course, is something that has been with us now, officially, it seems for 20 years. It started a little bit longer ago than that back in the, I think, the late 1990s.
It's certainly something that has been on the landscape ever since I have been a writer with an internet connection. I've taken part a few times. Lots of people I know have taken part. There are lots of online communities built around it, and I've been part of many writer sprints locally to me here in Oxford that take place each November to bring together people who are taking part in the challenge to write 50,000 words in a month.
In that time, we have seen some very famous books come through NaNoWriMo. Most famously of all, I guess, possibly, is the Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern's book, which I think was one of the first books I really noticed going viral in my local Waterstones, and other really high-profile books.
So, one of the most high-profile indie books of all, Hugh Howey's, Wool, began life apparently as a NaNoWriMo project. So, what has happened?
You will know that there has been a considerable controversy. One of the things I didn't cover regards safeguarding concerns around the time it took the organization behind NaNoWriMo to deal with allegations made against one of their moderators around grooming. That obviously caused considerable concerns given the community element of the organization.
Then last year they got themselves into hot water with the statements they made around AI. So, they pointedly did not take a stance on whether they were pro or anti-AI. The stance they took was that they didn't want people to take a stance that was anti or pro-AI, but they made it very clear that they had concerns about some of the criticisms of AI that were being thrown and still are being thrown around very strongly amongst writers’ communities.
This didn't go down well, and one thing has led to another, and it seems, officially, for financial reasons, but also because of reputational reasons, the people behind the official group, which is the group that comes with the badge.
I think it's a shield. When I took part, it was light blue and brown, and you could badge yourself as saying, I'm taking part in NaNoWriMo. You would log on and there would be a group, and you'd follow your progress and there'd be all these little tracker bars that you could put everywhere.
So, the group that organizes that, as a result, as I say, of financial and reputational reasons, will no longer be running a central hub for those who want to use November to write 50,000 words. So, very much the end of a very long and very literally storied era in writing history.
So, what else has been happening?
AI Lawsuits Consolidated
Let's get the AI news out of the way. There are lots and lots of lawsuits going on around issues to do with copyright and how large language models are training their AI, whether or not they're using shadow libraries and so on, and pirated copies of books, whether they're getting consent or not from authors. So, authors and publishers bringing all kinds of lawsuits, and 12 of the most high-profile lawsuits, including the one that has been brought against Meta, which has led to all the released internal memos that have been causing considerable Bruhaha, they have all been wrapped up into one case, consolidated as the result of something that I didn't know existed, but now I do, which is a transfer order from the judicial panel who's been looking at this.
So, OpenAI had actually asked for cases to be consolidated. They'd asked for that to happen. I think in North Carolina that hasn't happened, instead they're going to all be considered in New York. But this definitely feels like a preliminary victory for the technology companies; they wanted everything to happen together.
Writers and rights holders have said, look, all these cases are very different, that's why they are different cases. We think that there are particular aspects of each that need considering severally, but the judicial panel has decided that there are enough common elements that they should all be considered together, and there is enough danger, they believe, of inconsistent rulings for them all to be considered together.
So, that is going to be something very much to follow with interest because whatever happens in that is going to clearly now have very widespread ramifications and set massive precedent.
UK Authors Protest Outside Meta HQ
Talking of Meta and LibGen, authors in the UK have taken to the streets to protest against it. They protested outside the Meta HQ in London with placards, with typically writerly slogans on, such as, “I'd write a better sign, but you'd just steal it”.
It was a protest that came with an open letter that basically wants Meta to be brought before UK Parliament to answer for its use of Library Genesis in training its AI systems.
Whether or not that's going to happen, who knows?
University Study Finds Evidence AI Platforms Were Trained on Copyrighted Material
But as an interesting final note on AI and backdrop to all of this, new research by the University of Washington has found evidence that platforms have trained their AI models on copyrighted material. So, they use a way of tracking what they called high surprisal tokens.
That's something that you can only imagine a university coming up with, and I say that as someone who loves universities dearly and works in one. Basically, what that means is they put in loads and loads of prompts to AI, and they paid particular attention, they marked up those responses that contained words that were unusual in the context in which they occurred.
So, you wouldn't expect an AI that had just been trained on a general body of data to have produced this. Rather, you would expect that this was an indication that the usage had come from elsewhere and been copy pasted, basically, and this kind of analysis found that there were all kinds of, these high surprisal tokens, which basically showed that they were training their AI on places where these must have occurred originally, and those instances were copyright protected ones.
Therefore, this is evidence that AI's have been trained on copyright protected materials. The study, obviously it's quite a small one. It's quite a large one, but in the scope of the whole AI universe, it's quite a small one. But it is very much an interesting backdrop, and it makes certain arguments that people might want to make about how this could never have happened slightly harder to justify, and it provides evidence for what a lot of authors have been saying along, which goes along the lines of, when you put a certain prompt in what you get out can only have been generated if the model had been trained on my book.
This now seems to be evidence that would back up that interpretation of some prompt responses.
Kindle Announces Recap AI Feature
Finally, news from Kindle. Kindle is getting a new feature. It's a feature called Kindle Recaps, and it's based on AI. It's the same kind of AI that produces those summaries of reviews, I think, that you get when you log onto a book and it says, customers say this.
If you're reading a series of books, it provides literally what it says, recaps, so little histories of the characters and the storylines in the book you are reading at the moment that have happened in previous books in the series.
On a positive note, it is good to see that you will only get recaps based on books that you have bought or borrowed yourself. So, if you go into book 10 of a series without having bought or borrowed any of the previous books you can't use the feature. You have to do what everyone else does and just look at the plot on Wikipedia.
So, it's not disincentivizing people buying a series of books. It's designed to keep people within the environment of their Kindle app while they are reading, to stop them logging out and get people reading more, which sounds like a good thing.
I'm not quite so sure that they have asked all the rights holders involved for their permission to do this and to use their books in this way. Probably, they would count it as business use. I've not seen too many comments by writers on this to know what the general opinion in the community is.
I'm sure readers will find it incredibly useful provided it's not intrusive. It sounds a little bit like the x-ray feature you get when you're watching videos on Amazon, which drives me absolutely bananas because it keeps appearing in the corner of the screen every time I dare move and then takes an age to disappear. So, provided it doesn't do that, I'm sure readers will love it.
We have yet to see, as I say, whether writers do or not, but it's another sign that Amazon is not looking to give up on books anytime soon, and that sounds like a positive.
So, on that, I'm going to go out for another run in the sun while I can, on the few days of the year when it's shining, and I will look forward to speaking to you all again next week.
Thank you.
