Authors Guild Exploring Blanket License For Artificial Intelligence Companies

The Authors Guild is exploring a model for its members to opt in to the offering of a blanket license to artificial intelligence companies for use of content to build automated chatbots. Early discussions involve a fee to use works as training materials and a prohibition on outputs that borrow too much from existing material.

“We have to be proactive because generative AI is here to stay,” says Mary Rasenberger, chief executive of the organization, in an interview with . The exec notes that best selling author James Patterson helped fund the project. “They need high quality books. Our position is that there’s nothing wrong with the tech, but it has to be legal and licensed.” Under the model, there’d be a fee for the ingestion of works and another for outputs that reference content.

Talks include restrictions on prompting the chatbots to produce material “in the style of” authors, using characters from other works and producing summaries of books. “The control part is as important as the compensation,” says Rasenberger, who stresses that the licensing model would be an opt in regime.

Among roughly 2,400 members surveyed, roughly 38 percent said they’d be interested in participating, she adds. Issues yet to be worked: Whether fees should be tied to the length and popularity of works. The platform, which could be called the “Author’s Registry,” would distribute fees for licenses.

A board would be installed, alongside a new organization, to oversee the project. As for timing, Rasenberger says, “It’s not like it’ll be up and running by [this year], but we have the money for it.” AI companies thus far have resisted striking licensing deals with authors, opting to obtain the data from internet based book collections.

Among the reasons the Authors Guild is exploring a licensing deal is because AI companies are expected to argue in court that it had no choice but to use materials sourced from shadow library sites to train chatbots since it wouldn’t be practical to individually negotiate licenses with thousands of authors.

In September, the group — led by prominent fiction authors including George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen and John Grisham — sued OpenAI, accusing the company of engaging “in a systematic course of mass scale copyright infringement” to “power their lucrative commercial endeavor.” While it remains unknown which works were used as training materials, the authors point to ChatGPT generating summaries and in depth analyses of the themes in their novels.

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