The Authors Guild, the largest and oldest professional organization for writers in the United States, is teaming with a new start-up, Created by Humans, to help writers license rights to their books to artificial intelligence companies.
The partnership, announced Wednesday, comes as authors and publishers are wrestling with the rapid incursion of artificial intelligence into the book world. The internet is already flooded with books generated by A.I., and sophisticated chatbots can instantly generate detailed summaries of books and spew out material in the voice and style of popular writers.
The Authors Guild has taken an aggressive stance against the unauthorized use of books by A.I. companies to train large language models, which power chatbots that can generate complex and often evocative text. Last year, it brought a class-action lawsuit on behalf of authors against OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, arguing that using books to train Chat GPT’s chatbot without licensing the rights amounts to copyright infringement. (The Times also sued OpenAI and Microsoft last year, claiming copyright infringement of news content used by A.I. systems.)
By endorsing Created by Humans’ platform, the Authors Guild is in a sense acknowledging that there is no avoiding the disruption that A.I. has unleashed on the book business. Through their partnership, the Authors Guild will help Created by Humans develop informational webinars for authors that will explain how licensing works and what their options are.
“What’s good about licensing is it gives the author and the publisher control, as well as compensation, and it gives you the ability to say no,” said Mary Rasenberger, the chief executive of the Authors Guild, who will serve on Created by Humans’ advisory board. “Right now, it’s the A.I. companies that just went and crawled pirate websites and swept all that material in.”
Several A.I. companies have already registered interest in licensing book content through the platform, said Trip Adler, the co-founder and chief executive of Created by Humans. Adler declined to name the companies, citing nondisclosure agreements.
“We want to be the company that sticks up for and protects the work of human creators, while also helping them navigate A.I. and profit off it,” said Adler, who previously co-founded and led Scribd, a digital subscription services for books and audio content.
How this would work in practice for authors is still hazy. Created by Humans, which launched in June with $5 million in funding from investors, hasn’t revealed a precise payment model, and Adler declined to elaborate on how much authors would potentially make, noting that the market is still nascent.
The company has been testing the platform with a handful of authors and plans to officially launch later this year, Adler said. It has recruited a prominent backer from the literary world, the writer Walter Isaacson, who is an investor and adviser to Created by Humans.
Isaacson, who has written best-selling biographies of Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci and Elon Musk, said he plans to license his own books for use by A.I. companies, and has urged his publisher, Simon & Schuster, to use the platform for its other books and authors.
“This is a major inflection point, just as the invention of search engines like Google was, in which people who create content could benefit hugely, or get left behind,” Isaacson said in an interview.
Authors who use Created by Humans will be able to create a profile and indicate which books they want to license, and for what type of use. The platform separates licensing rights into several categories, including one that grants tech companies the right to use books to train large language models, another that enables companies to reference works in real-time to provide quotes or summaries, and another category for transformative rights, which allow A.I. users to create new derivative works based on an author’s books. Such works could include books written in an author’s voice and style, works using a writer’s plot and characters, or new works, like a graphic novel, based on the original book.
Even if authors and publishers are able to earn money from A.I. companies, the proliferation of A.I.-generated material could still hurt the industry. For instance, if popular authors decide to license their books for transformative use, allowing A.I. users to produce books based on their characters, the market could quickly be flooded with copycat books, making it harder for human authors to find an audience.
The novelist Douglas Preston, a former president of the Authors Guild, said many writers he knows are suspicious of A.I. licensing and worry that it will give more fuel to A.I. companies. But Preston himself is more optimistic: He is an investor in Created by Humans, and plans to license his books through the platform. Still, he’s still worried about A.I.-generated books that use his style or characters, he said.
“It could be that A.I. starts creating works that are directly competing with me in the marketplace,” he said, “and I certainly wouldn’t want that.”
The post Can a Start-Up Help Authors Get Paid by A.I. Companies? appeared first on New York Times.
