As Thomas Pynchon wrote, we live in the strange AI Times.
The literary website Lit Hub and more than 1,000 authors, bookstores and librarians have signed an open letter to Big Five Publishers (Penguin, Random House, Harpercollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan). Among the authors who signed are comic creators Seko Bell, Samira Ahmed, Lev Grossman, Mackenzie Lee, Matt de La Pena, Rainbow Lowell, Nick Stone and Chuck Wendig.
If you would like to add a signature, please feel free to contact us here. This petition can be signed to anyone who works in publishing, including authors, agents, bookstores, librarians, editors, illustrators, designers, production staff, public relations officers, marketers, translators, contracts and publishing rights, and audio narrators and producers.
What is the illuminated hub AI petition?
The bright hub letter asks publishers to pledge “They will never release books created by machines” and “they will not replace human staff with AI tools or disassemble their positions into AI monitors.”
“The text produced by AI feels cheap because it is cheap. It feels easy because it is easy to produce. That’s the overall point,” the letter states. “AI is a very powerful tool and has the ability to actually socially beneficial to stay here, but art and artist replacement is not one of them.”
When talking about AI to train the author’s work, the illuminated Hub letter adds: “These stories are stolen from us and used to train machines that can quickly produce books to fill the bookstores if the capital greed of myopia wins. The money our work makes for them, someone else is paid for the technology built on our unpaid labor.”
This letter also laid out the terms the author wants.
We invite publishers to pledge:
We will not openly or secretly publish books written using AI tools stolen from the author. We do not invent “authors” to promote books generated by AI, nor allow human authors to publish books generated by AI, which are built on the author’s stolen work using pseudonyms. They don’t design part of the book they release using AI built on the work of stolen artists. None of the employees will be replaced entirely or partially with AI tools. We will not create new positions to oversee the creation of writing or art created by AI built on the work of stolen artists. Rewrite the current employee’s job description and remodel the position into an AI monitor based on the work of the stolen artist. For example, the Copy Editor will continue to edit the title without monitoring and modifying the AI copy editing “Work”. In all circumstances, we only hire a human audiobook narrator, not a “narrator” generated by AI tools built on stolen voices.
How does the publisher respond? Can this enthusiasm be seen in the comic book industry as well? The heart of the problem is compensation and technology that replaces people.
This controversy continues…
This line is drawn in the sand, at least in the literary world.
This work includes additional contributions by Ollie Kaplan.
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