Big tech firms have come out guns a blazing against authors and publishers, saying they should have a right to use their works to train AI models for free. And if authors can’t make money, they can always mow lawns.
OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft are being sued for using authors’ works to train their generative AI models, without any acknowledgement or compensation.
As well as facing multiple class actions by authors, OpenAI and Microsoft face a lawsuit by The New York Times for accessing its content without permission.
Employees from Meta and Microsoft say much of what authors produce is of little financial value and should be basically free for them to use.
Yann LeCun. Picture: X
Microsoft employee Tren Griffin has gone further, suggesting that struggling authors may be better off mowing lawns in their neighbourhood rather than angling big tech for compensation.
“A survey of 5,699 published authors, found that in 2022, their median gross pre-tax income from their books was $2,000,” says Griffin. “You can generate more revenue than that in less time by mowing lawns in your neighbourhood.” Griffin also sits on the board of satellite communications firm Kymeta Corporation.
In lengthy comments on the Twitter (X) platform, Meta Chief AI scientist Yann LeCun argues that authors’ works could be treated like open source software, and says jazz musicians typically make money from their teaching positions and get almost nothing from their recordings.
“Only a small number of book authors make significant money from book sales,” he says on X. “This seems to suggest that most books should be freely available for download. The lost revenue for authors would be small, and the benefits to society large by comparison,” he says.
“Many authors I know are more motivated by the impact of their intellectual productions than by the income it might generate through books and other publications. Many of them face the following trade-off: will I give up income in exchange for increased readership by making my book free for download, or will I generate income while decreasing readership by charging for my book?”
” Many of those people have realized that the free download, instead of reducing printed sales, actually *increases* sales. There are famous examples.”
LeCun received an avalanche of online criticism for his posts. “No matter how you phrase it, you’re telling people their efforts years are worth $0, because that’s better for you,” says one respondent. “You are trading decency for a fable about pragmatism,” says another.
Meta faces additional legal action for training its LLaMa large language models using an unlawful repository of 196,000 pirated and mostly copyrighted books, again without compensation to authors.
The Australian Society of Authors last month revealed it had received phone calls or emails from over 150 affected authors. Helen Garner, Richard Flanagan, Dervla McTiernan, Sophie Cunningham, Trent Dalton, Shaun Tan, Markus Zusak, Tim Winton, Christos Tsiolkas, Andy Griffiths, Melissa Lucashenko, Tom Keneally, Jane Harper, and Robbie Arnott were among those impacted.
Australian authors are awaiting the outcomes of class actions which are being played out under US copyright law. US lawyers Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick who represent authors have branded ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA as “industrial-strength plagiarists that violate the rights of book authors”.
Andres Guadamuz, a reader in intellectual property law at the University of Sussex, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of World Intellectual Property, says the dispute might be resolves long-term through content licensing agreements.
“We may get quite a few settlements out of court, and we may even get a few decisions, but I think that what makes more sense at the moment is for trainers to pay some sort of licensing, or make agreements with large publishers to gain access to large amounts of text. After all, you only need to do it once per model training.”
The idea that authors should swap their jobs for mowing lawns has left some aghast. Australian Publishers Association Head of Communications & Australia Reads, Anna Burkey, says authors needed to be paid more. “Earnings of authors in Australia are on average very low. We would like to see those increase so we think that people need to pay for content.
“If they want to enjoy somebody’s work, then they can pay for access to that content.”
