The previous weekend I felt a touch of stage fright before I was scheduled to join a panel on authorship and artificial intelligence at an event titled Whose Truth? Writers and Readers Forum, organized by the Authors Guild.
I anticipated that I would face a flood of questions I wouldn’t be able to answer, and I dislike not having answers. I expected to say “I don’t know” quite a bit. That’s simply the reality of discussing AI these days, when even the most ardent AI advocates aren’t entirely sure what the technology might unleash, leaving the rest of us to try to make sense of it.
But as I listened to the panel before mine, titled Writing About Real People, I was struck by how much time the speakers spent debating the necessity of obtaining permissions for song lyrics or quotes from films to include in their books. Publishers have always been extraordinarily cautious about avoiding fair use violations—they tend to err on the side of caution to dodge lawsuits from other media companies. If you’re writing a biography of a singer, you might include a line or two from their songs, but that’s increasingly rare.
As I started my panel and we discussed how AI alters our art, our brains, our natural world, and our livelihoods, it struck me that we are living in a moment when the tech crowd has effectively declared themselves entitled to all books that claim transformative fair use. Our books now belong to them. The insistence to “shut up and let this happen” can be dizzying.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about fair use throughout my career. For my first book, Slaughterhouse 90210, a playful Tumblr-turned-coffee-table project, Macmillan’s legal team decided that including screenshots from TV shows would not be acceptable for the printed page. I would need to navigate the proper channels to obtain permissions for what had once been a truly DIY project. In the end I spent about $50,000, purchasing all photos through Getty or other photo agencies and painstakingly weighing the value of each image.
[pullquotes]It feels as though publishers, at least the people in the C-suites, have already given up, deferring to tech companies with barely a whimper, let alone a bang.[/pullquotes]
Now generative AI firms are consuming entire industries by claiming that their blatant pirating of copyrighted material to train large language models constitutes fair use. They tell us that such LLM training amounts to “reading” and not theft, even as recently unsealed files reveal that OpenAI anticipated this would harm authors. Of course they knew! This seems to be tolerated by the US justice system. It’s a relief that the Authors Guild is taking action to resist AI, but the Big Five publishers are doing less so.
For decades Amazon’s dominance in publishing has been a staple topic among editors, even as the US government—even under Democratic administrations—has resisted launching an antitrust investigation into the $2.8 trillion company. Now Amazon wields substantial investments in Anthropic and OpenAI and appears ready to disrupt a range of creative industries with minimal opposition.
It feels as though publishers, at least the people in the C-suites, have already given up, deferring to tech companies with barely a whimper, let alone a bang. Last week Adam Morgan reported for WIRED that three major book publishers are using AI to craft marketing copy, jacket copy and jacket art, among other tasks. It is difficult for publishers to stand against AI with just a few lawsuits on one hand while simultaneously devaluing the work of their own employees and embedding AI tools into their workflows on the other. All of this despite an awareness that AI usage is creating a host of existential challenges for the industry. How painful it is to watch major publishers devote more energy to figuring out how to weave AI into their processes than to try to push it back out the door.
How deeply frustrating it is that publishers fail to recognize that we are all underdogs in this struggle against an AI takeover. We can hope the midterm elections bring greater government oversight of AI, but counting on the government to rescue us is misguided given how closely mainstream Democrats are tied to Big Tech. There are countless uncertainties about how AI will shape our future, but one thing is certain: in the meantime too many businesses are ceding control to AI overlords with little resistance. Workers deserve better.
