A Sip of Claret News | Happy New Year!
3rd January 2025
Happy New Year - and the Joys of AI
Happy New Year dear readers! I hope you all had an excellent holiday filled with good cheer and books.
The most exhausting part about technology is that there’s always something new to learn - and it’s got to be learned quickly. The quantity of change and its pace is numbing.
As a survival tactic, I learn exactly what I need and not a byte more. So I have not been in involved in this latest tech hype over ChatGBT. Why would I? It can’t edit to a standard that I find even remotely acceptable (although that is equally true of many of my human colleagues). It can’t find the diamonds-in-the-rough submissions (ditto about my colleagues). And it can’t tell me how to persuade people to read more books in general and Claret Press books in particular. Actually it did tell me that. Become an influencer on TikTok. Have one of your authors win the Nobel Prize. Publish the next Harry Potter. And who am I to argue with that?
Recently I have had to engage with this AI issue. I signed a contract for a clever and caring thriller with a new author, a former City of London actuary who now lives state-side. His name is Mark Griffin.
Mark’s written a fabulous book that I can’t wait to share with all of you. But he did something that literally not a single previous author has ever done: he requested that his work be protected from data mining and that this be a clause in our contract.
A few days later, the bulletin of the publishing industry announced a new publishing
company which intends to publish 8,000 new titles a year of AI-generated stories. (In
comparison, Claret Press aims to publish five and typically fails to achieve that aim.) Using large language modelling, this new company intends to have no authors, pay no royalties or sign any contracts. Large language models have scraped the Internet and also published books to determine what most tickles the fancy of the average reader, and then reproduces it in readable prose. It’s not plagiarism. But it’s not original either.
Unless you’re an intellectual property lawyer you might be confused about the legality of data mining or scraping the internet.
Here’s the short version: what’s yours is yours unless you haven’t stated that.
Here’s the longer version: An author has both a moral right and a copyright in their own creation. (NOTE: Not all jurisdictions recognise moral rights, for example England does not.) The publisher and the author create an agreement – a contract – in which the author licences to the publisher the right to reproduce, distribute and sell the work they have created - a copyright. The publisher then holds the copyright for the duration of the licence. This licence is a kind of property. It’s an asset like a house, a car or a pearl necklace. The publisher can sell that asset for the duration of the licence. Or bits of it. A sophisticated publisher can slice and dice
it more ways than a Veg-o-Matic.
The default assumption of our legal system is that no one is allowed to take your belongings without your permission.
When it comes to books, the notion is that one cannot buy words. A reader buys the paper on which the words are printed, but the words remain the property of the copyright holder. When you buy a book, what you’re actually buying is a ream of paper plus a license to read those words as long as that particular book survives. Drop the book in the bath or leave it behind in a hotel room: the publisher does not owe you another copy.
But when it comes to the ability of tech companies to collect creators’ content, the rules seem to change. It appears that the big companies have managed to persuade governments that having a machine read, record and store these works (as is inevitably necessary), and subject them to algorithmic processing, rephrasing and so on is a use that falls outside of existing legal frameworks and is therefore not prohibited by the author’s moral copyright or the publisher's licensed copyright.
Furthermore, the big companies’ position is that this process is “transformative”, such that the resulting material is a new work, the rights to which belong, not to the original creators, but to the company. This argument is bolstered by the fact that this is also how creators create. Children learn from consuming and storing in their brains a wide range of materials. Their first creative works tend to be poor copies of someone else’s.
But AI is not a human child. It’s not even a living entity. AI is one thing and one thing only: a money maker.
So here’s how it stands: if you say “Don’t take my stuff,” everyone knows that you object to your works being used to train AI, or any other machine-driven, data-mining process, and companies are supposed to respect that.
(Literally: We do not give our consent for AI to use any of our data including written
materials, title cover images, blog posts, author likenesses, etc, for any purposes whether it be for training or developing generative artificial intelligence or any products from generative artificial intelligence.)
Tech companies have voluntarily agreed to foreswear scraping if you tell them not to. Bless ‘em. It has to be voluntary because there are no laws in the USA, UK and Canada that protect creators’ content. The EU has an incredibly weak law. It's been called "stringent" and "strong" but only because the rest of the world has zero. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
To that end, we have beefed up our statement that was already on our website stating that Claret Press books, press releases, social media and designs are not to be scraped. And we added that into Mark’s contract and going forward, into contracts for the future.
But really, this isn’t up to me. Or Mark. Or the contract. There’s a performative element to this, like taking off your belt and shoes at the airport to demonstrate that you’re not carrying explosives. In reality, it’s up to the IT companies to do what they voluntarily signed up for.
We have to trust them.
And what’s not to trust. After all, Microsoft and Google have such a strong track record of unimpeachable business practices.
Mark Griffin is a qualified Chartered Financial Analyst, actuary and EMT. Working as a Chief Risk Officer, he has been responsible for not just analysis, but also serving as the corporate incarnation of cop, investigator and crime reporter.
He lives in New York State with his family and their rescue dog Ollie.
We're excited to publish his debut novel The Mortality Thief, a sharp thriller where the devil is in the details.
We've joined the Indie Press Network! The Indie Press Network is an open network that seeks to help connect independent publishers with each other, with booksellers and with readers.
We're delighted to be in the company of fellow indie publishers like Renard Press, Galley Beggar Press, Bluemoose Books and many more. Together we're making a real difference in the wider publishing landscape, proving that creativity, risk-taking, excellence and passion can be found outside the shadow of the Big 5 publishing houses.
In our next livestream of Ask the Author, where we speak with our authors about their writing and more, we'll be in conversation with Steve Powell.
To celebrate the inauguration of the new president of the United States, we are discussing term limits as a reform to governance. Will limiting the number of years a congressperson can serve reduce the cronyism, the pork barrelling and the elitism of Washington?
Join the conversation on Tuesday 7th January 2024, 7pm-8pm.
The link to watch the livestream on YouTube is below:
We're excited to share the next episode in our new online series Adaptations and Conversations, in which Katie Isbester (Publisher) and her friend Michelle discuss books, their adaptations to film, TV and theatre, and talk with you about what you think.
It's the ultimate fanfiction adaptation. It started life as the first in a fantasy book series, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank L Baum published in 1900. It became the beloved classic movie in 1939 The Wizard of Oz, starring Judy Garland. Then The Wiz, a 1978 movie starring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross, then Oz: The Great and Powerful (2013) starring James Franco. Then a book called Wicked (1995) by Gregory Maguire, which became the 2003 Broadway musical and now the film. And I'm sure I've left out a few. We're going to compare only the Wickeds: book, theatre play, movie.
We hope to see you there.
The link to the YouTube livestream is below:
