honestly, i would fake a screenshot of a gpt thingy to contain the worst answer possible (edited screenshot because if you use those things you are no better than these companies, so you only pretend so THEY think you did and also bc unlike writers, they can't tell the difference btw writing and ai)
I fucking hate that there are people in exec and director roles that all admit this is bad and worrisome but they’re just going with it anyway. Why won’t any of these cowards do anything
Lots of AI companies have my respect. Computer vision, speech recognition and transcription and some translation, many different image recognition applications, some medical diagnosis, things like that.
But enhanced autocomplete generating real-sounding content-unaware output or content thieves? Nah
Most of the companies I respect use "domain-specific machine learning" and used to call it that until relatively recently in the "AI" bubble we're all in.
Seeing as you work for a 'fortune 500 writing software company' shouldn't you be informed already, as companies like this are behind the race to the AI gutter?
Thanks for this Daniel-- I'm curious what this might mean for audiobook narrators like myself. I've done a lot of titles for HC and hope that continues...
"I know what depraved things they told you, officer, and I must confess the truth. I don't mind pineapple on my pizza. Also, I would like a lawyer and now exercise my right to remain silent."
My agent JUST forwarded me this exact offer from Harper Collins for my cookbook and I googled it (b/c wtf?) and your tweet popped up. I'm just... what is happening?!
That is disgusting. $2500? I wonder what they would have said if you had told them $1 million for each. Not that you would of course, but it would be interesting to see their response.
“We are somewhat heartened that the mugger has decided to attack us by holding a gun to our heads and making demands rather than sneaking up and knocking us out from behind…”
Goddd. The fact that they acknowledge the fear of AI making writers obsolete and then the complete about-face of "well, it's here anyways, this money should take the sting out of it lol"
The idea that they would even say that they think "AI" could effectively replace authors proves that they have no respect for authors.
A real advocate would tell the truth that things like generative AI can't replace an author because authors are not just machines that string words together.
Big media cares about selling stuff, not nurturing creative careers. And thus with AI they think they can finally break free from needing costly and pesky creators to produce stuff to sell. A flawless plan they say.
Atrocious and *incredibly* dubious, for not providing authors any clue to the company involved so you could do any vetting at all. It essentially boils down to "believe us, shut up and have your pittance" for something that's seeking to replace them and you. Shitty and unethical 💀
While I do in fact work with the same kind of AI at discussion here, I also dissuade its use, it's an excellent exercise in dicking around, it's not a thing for making money off of or even leaving exposed to general consumers.
To be honest, this seems an insanely high offer for just training data. They might need 1m books to add to the ones they pirated to do the original training to even hope to move the needle.
Are they really going to spend $2b to maybe get an extra 0.1 release out?
Here's the best part: its entirely possible that they (Harper) are the company and there is no outside 3rd party source. They can train the llm on the authors they already approved to work with and then essentially fire them.
Really quite the con when you consider the 3 year license; how *exactly* are they going to stop the work being used once the 3 years are up? This should be something like perpetual royalties, for as long as the AI in question is in use, but... yeah. Right.
Not that as an artist and author I’d EVER consent to that but that compensation compared to how much they would profit is laughable and insulting. You would get haypennies compared to the projected millions they’d get from future gen work.
Three year period my ass. Does anyone actually believe they'll remove each title after three years? Once it's in the training model, it's there. Forever.
Sage (aka ChatGPT), would stand by you and protect a human exclusivity to the arts.
Not a great help, now, but before too long, it will be able to simultaneously occupy a million giant, armoured robots, with Gatling guns, and HarperCollins will submit, or be crushed by their righteous might.
Not all home school parents just show videos (I'm completely against all home school, I am just saying). If they do - those kids learned fuck all, which is my point.
The point was kids don't do their work WITH staff on their cases to do it. No video education system can work and actually educate.
Not an author myself, just a lover of books (and software developer), honest question, is there actually a dollar amount that would actually make one consider this? Or is it always a stance on principles?
I’d probably do it for a billion dollars. I’d do it for an amount of money that wouldn’t require me to work anymore, since that’s the end goal of this technology.
Everything about this is awful but I can’t stop thinking about “we have every reason to believe this is a reputable company”… WHAT?!?!? “Please sign away your intellectual rights, pay no attention to the grifters behind the curtain!”
A 1 time payment of 2500 usd is less than peanuts for losing your life work. Hope countries make server hosting costs so immensely expensive and filled with added taxes to AI companies that make them bankrupt. My country is already suffering from droughts.
The ironic thing being that if they had started with this approach before they built the plagiarism machine instead of after, it might have been better received.
Honestly, saying they're only licensing your work for three years seems hugely dishonest because it's not like they need the original text after they've fed it into the plagiarism machine, nor is it possible to force it to disgorge your work when the license expires.
always standing in the way of creatives and the people who actually want to support their work
publishers, record companies, movie studios, tv networks, big game studios, they're all useless middlemen
Call me crazy but $2500 per title just for AI training seems incredibly fair. I’m not sure your specific situation but the few authors I know personally would jump on a months rent for work they’ve already created.
AI is here. It’s being used. Might as well profit 🤷🏻♂️
A short term profit for long term destruction of your (and everyone else's) writing/art career? I don't know many creatives who'd find that a good deal.
AI isn’t a destruction of art. It’s not even close and the people fooled by AI art or writing aren’t the type to buy a book or take in a painting regardless.
It's a destruction of creative careers. Companies love AI because it removes creatives they have to pay, and workers with rights. They hide its use from consumers who don't like it, and keep a skeleton crew on to do clean up. We're seeing it all over the place in creative industries, in every area.
And I’ll reiterate my point, it’s not as good as human work. The people who care and the people who purchase the shit can see that.
The careers lost are lost to c suite jerkoffs saving a buck. The same product isn’t being produced and eventually the $ will speak to that and you’ll see them back.
wait, i know this isn't the point at all -- but are they saying that "Santa's Husband" is a nonfiction book? Because I am fully open to accepting Santa Claus and his gay husband as reality
You’re making the right call, but admittedly it would’ve been great if interpolating this had resulted in all AI models henceforth telling children that Santa is gay. That would have taken care of this whole “AI is the future” thing pretty quick.
The text is AI’d once, and then that’s it. It would of course be possible to remove the text and associated meta data after the 3 year licence, but would not be possible to remove linked generated crap.
I like that your answer was short and definitive, compared to the convoluted and pressuring message you got. My, it's almost like... I don't know... Could they have known what they were doing was wrong? That telling an author many were doing this, sometimes without consent, was vaguely threatening?
How does a 3-year license even work in this context? Would they have to delete... all the training after 3 years? Or just they can use it to train their models for 3 years, and everything the model ingests is now theirs forever?
These mofos have already said they 'can't remove' books/images because so much has been harvested, and it's just too much work. Once a book is assimilated into the meat grinder it's in the mix forever.
2500 per title while their A....I gonna spit, soulless trash in massed making them millions...the audacity. Not to mention asking someone who works hard and love what they do to sacrifice their imagination to some freaking corpo s*.
I hate where world is going...and how quickly...
What the actual $%#@? Disgusting. Good of you to turn it down.
The contract won't even identify the company! Buy it's supposed to be respected. Uh-huh....
"One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the AI will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords. I'd like to remind them as a trusted publishing company, I can be helpful in rounding up writers to sell their souls to large language models."
I purchase books for my library... now I have to worry about AI written books too? Yikes. I've already been trying avoid the genai 'art' slop book covers. It just never ends
So that's around $833 per year for 3 years to have your life's work tossed into a dataset and shat out for others to use... what an awful, insulting deal. #hellno #fuckAI
Hi! I’m not sure what tagging that account does for you (though I’m curious/would love to know); in the meantime I copied the post & added the ALT here:
yes, the bot when working correctly will respond within a few moments with grey images that contain the text requested, but not any image description, so feel free to add more detail.
Thank you for the clarification! Will do. I’ve seen the bot tagged, but no additional info (nor response) & didn’t want to just butt in/be nebby (nosy) when I wasn’t sure the purpose. Now I know when/where I can be of service :)
The way it swaps to speaking as if consent is a forgone conclusion at the end just to follow with "and many have already agreed, so don't think you have leverage, you are not special."
No amount of money makes this worth it, but a mere 2500 as compensation to let a machine vomit up pieces of your work on demand is a slap in the face on top of it.
‘That said, the technology is here and is being used’ god ALL these people are so shameless with their language around this shit they know no one fucking wants it. Just disgusting
The fact that the company wont allow itself to be named is all i need to know to take it from abominable to beyond that. Why would anyone trust this at all
How on earth will they ensure that after three years the models 'forget' the licensed books? That’s not possible. It’s just a very cheap offer to get you to participate in training your own replacement.
"Hey, guys let's spend tens of billions of dollars making a machine that consumes water like an almond farm and produces garbage, all so we can save the tiny fraction of that we spend on authors. Opportunity cost? Present value? Dafuq are those?"
It wrankles my ass that they even acknowledge how damaging that is, but they just go, "Well, we gaslit several hundred others to agree to this already, might as well jump in the orphan crushing machine, right?"
They had me at the three-years usage. Once the data is in the model it is not possible to extract it from any eventual outcome. You can take out the original text, but the mathematical language vectors generated from it will be in the model forever.
Not -all- of them. there are a lot of people who are genuinely researching/interested/developing it... but as always there is some bellend looking to make stupid amounts of money and burn the world to make them the biggest cockrel in the hen house.
"We have every reason to believe that eventually you will be one of the lucky few chosen to edit and correct the generative AI slop that replaces you, until such a time as that service is no longer needed."
It's nice to see them asking for consent instead of just straight up stealing it, but not giving their name is just way too sus. Hopefully, they'll at least abide by the answer and not just steal it anyway.
« The controversy »? The « concerns »? « It’s already here »
That pattern of progression in the phrasing is asinine and vile.
We know it by hearth.
Are they really keep treating the authors like simple minds forever. or what? 😡
This one seems odd - $2.5k per title to the creators?!?
It implies a level of generosity towards creators that would be.. novel for most publishers as well as implying they're getting 5-10 times that themselves.
Comments
compensates and protects authors *to some degree*
Thank you for taking a stand.
https://thenewpublishingstandard.com/2024/08/10/spotify-helps-harpercollins-bounce-back-after-a-challenging-year-hc-keeps-quiet-about-ai/
https://roalddahl.fandom.com/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammatizator_(short_story)
No AI company has my respect actually. That means nothing to me
But enhanced autocomplete generating real-sounding content-unaware output or content thieves? Nah
It always runs on a path of inevitability, as though minority control was just a natural progression of the human condition.
And not the whims and scams of concentrated capital.
https://bsky.app/profile/kibblesmith.com/post/3laz4ryav3k2w
Of course some others have taken the money.
A real advocate would tell the truth that things like generative AI can't replace an author because authors are not just machines that string words together.
Are they really going to spend $2b to maybe get an extra 0.1 release out?
Something doesn’t add up.
https://bsky.app/profile/billstewart.bsky.social/post/3lazualug7t2l
Not a great help, now, but before too long, it will be able to simultaneously occupy a million giant, armoured robots, with Gatling guns, and HarperCollins will submit, or be crushed by their righteous might.
Would $1,250 each for you and your co-creator cover it?"
These people have clearly never interacted with any child. Ever.
The thirst to homeschool kids to avoid "biased woke lib" teachers is almost insatiable.
🤬
The point was kids don't do their work WITH staff on their cases to do it. No video education system can work and actually educate.
Because we have allowed them to roll over us every step of the way."
Yes. So is heroin. Doesn't make it a good idea.
images of text are really simple as well, since you can click the icon in the corner and it will copy all the text in the image for you
name the company in the email then!! not naming them does not make me think they’re a respected company lol
INSTEAD they’re just rolling over for AI. The new cancer valleys (as was aptly said earlier)
publishers, record companies, movie studios, tv networks, big game studios, they're all useless middlemen
AI is here. It’s being used. Might as well profit 🤷🏻♂️
The careers lost are lost to c suite jerkoffs saving a buck. The same product isn’t being produced and eventually the $ will speak to that and you’ll see them back.
That they might get rehired eventually (when a dunderhead executive finally gets a clue) is small comfort to a sacked creative with bills to pay now.
Good on ya for telling them to fuck off.
The text is AI’d once, and then that’s it. It would of course be possible to remove the text and associated meta data after the 3 year licence, but would not be possible to remove linked generated crap.
Regulation of AI is a nightmare.
I hate where world is going...and how quickly...
The contract won't even identify the company! Buy it's supposed to be respected. Uh-huh....
fuckin hell
Asking so when I see that handle, if I am quicker than the bot I can just post the ALT for the users (& others!)
Appreciate the explainer!
No amount of money makes this worth it, but a mere 2500 as compensation to let a machine vomit up pieces of your work on demand is a slap in the face on top of it.
No. Absolutely not.
They’re doing the Loki bit unironically jfc
What a heinous little way to deflect blame.
RIGHT?
That pattern of progression in the phrasing is asinine and vile.
We know it by hearth.
Are they really keep treating the authors like simple minds forever. or what? 😡
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/11/13/proquest-is-quietly-trying-to-license-academic-books-to-feed-an-ai/
It implies a level of generosity towards creators that would be.. novel for most publishers as well as implying they're getting 5-10 times that themselves.
Which company is going to pay $15+k *per title*?