1 week Ago By Catriona Menzies-Pike
If you, an author, wish to quote a line from a poem by Ted Hughes in your forthcoming work of fiction, you will need to set aside considerable amounts of time and possibly money in order to obtain permission to do so. Perhaps your character must quote a poem by Hughes in a pivotal scene. If this is the case, you will need to lodge a request via Faber & Faber, which handles the rights for the Hughes estate.
And even if you do get permission to quote, know that the estate has form when it comes to withdrawing permission for use of copyright material. If you are thinking of making your character a Beatles-obsessive who has a lyric for every occasion, forget it. Publishers generally consider obtaining such permissions to be the responsibility of authors, and so too payment of the licensing fee, which can be considerable.
If you can’t afford to pay the fee, or don’t want to, or simply don’t have time to wait for the permissions before publication date, you will need to amend your manuscript. These copyright restrictions often take authors by surprise, and many find the intricacies of the fair use exemption to be frustrating and onerous. Why can an essayist quote a poem, at least under some circumstances, but not a novelist? Why is fair use policed more rigorously in trade publishing than academic publishing? Why does a magazine or journal editor let a quote go through, but not a book publisher? Fair use lies at the heart of the copyright regimes that protect the rights of authors and allow rights-holders to reap an income from creative work.
If authors are vexed by the requirement to obtain permission to quote and pay license fees, they may take consolation that their intellectual property will similarly be protected, should someone wish to quote their work down the track. If this sounds like something of a history lesson, that is because the shared conventions and practices around fair use have been shattered by the advent of voracious large language models, also known as AI writing tools. Copyright law has always struggled to keep up with technologies of writing, reproduction and distribution, and has often been viewed by artists as out of step with creative practice.
It can take months to obtain permission to quote a given author, but only seconds to upload a pirated e-book to a file-sharing site. There are dozens of books by Ted Hughes on the LibGen database, which Meta — as we all now know — has allegedly been using in breach of copyright to train the latest iteration of its AI platform, Llama. Meta did not approach the Hughes estate for permission to use this material, nor any of the authors of the millions of books and journal articles it has been using to enhance the proficiency of its generative writing tool.
Its defence? Fair use. Class actions are underway. Authors are angry they weren’t asked, angry they aren’t getting paid, and the insult is compounded by the fact that the breach of copyright is being used to enhance tools that are an existential threat to the livelihood of writers.
Jodi McAlister is a romance novelist and academic who describes herself as an “AI conscientious objector”. The LibGen database contains five of her seven novels, two academic monographs and four scholarly articles, a haul that represents decades of creative and scholarly labour. Discovering this work had been “fed into the woodchipper was an intense and emotional experience”, she says.
“I am not interested in helping someone make me obsolete.” Only last month, Black Inc. was making headlines when it gave its authors just a few days to agree to a contract variation that would allow use of their books to train AI in exchange for 50% of receipts.
This latest episode is much worse. Poets, microbiologists, authors of business advice and self-help manuals, romance novelists, policy wonks, crime writers: to Meta, they’re all just content producers, and if it’s possible to avoid paying them, all the better. The cavalier treatment of writers in these negotiations is an indication, says novelist Yumna Kassab, of the power imbalance between writers and large companies, both publishers and tech behemoths.
“If they were dealing with other companies,” she says, “they wouldn’t act this way.” Meanwhile, the use of AI tools is widespread in universities. Creative writing academics attend university training seminars on how to integrate AI tools into their teaching and research in the morning, and then in the afternoon lead their students through discussions about the ethics of using AI and the moral obligations of writers and readers to each other.
One such teacher is novelist Felicity Castagna, whose students have grown up online and have become accustomed to consuming and producing free content. They have a sophisticated understanding of how online gift economies work, but ethical considerations aren’t always at the forefront of their minds. McAlister puts up a slide that details the ruinous environmental implications of using AI and explains that the tools are built on a database of stolen work — but the point that hits home for her students at Deakin, she says, is around copyright, and the uncharted legal territory around intellectual property rights for AI-generated content.
For Castagna, use of AI-generated texts in the classroom allows her to bring into focus the shortcomings of AI, especially when it comes to metaphor, connotative language and voice. These kinds of exercises help students conceptualise what it is for a writer to have a distinctive voice. And voice, says Castagna, is the hardest thing to teach in creative writing.
Castagna is more concerned about the influence of AI on reading practices and the reception of literary texts, especially in her classrooms. She’s encountered, with growing frequency, ChatGPT-generated misreadings and misquotations of her own works, which are taught widely in Australian schools. The tools can’t tell the difference, she says, between literal and ironic meanings, and as a result, misreadings proliferate.
Is there a fair or ethical way to use these technologies, given their ubiquity? It’s not helpful, says Castagna, to prohibit these tools. “They are here and students are going to use them. A better approach might be to ask, ‘what do we owe each other as readers and writers?’” Questions like this bring into view the larger context of Meta’s flagrant disregard for copyright.
Right now in Australia, no-one seems to think they owe writers very much. The cost of living is rising, but rates are still low, advances are low, grant funding is dwindling, and prizes are a lottery. The unlicensed use of copyright material to train AI tools is such an egregious affront to the moral value of creative labour, it’s easy to sideline the uncomfortable fact that, whatever Meta’s plans are, most authors make very little income from their writing.
“On a day-to-day level, the reality is that writing doesn’t pay the bills and AI won’t make much difference to that,” says Yumna Kassab. We’re living in a moment, says essayist and editor Cher Tan, “where it is getting exponentially more difficult to sustain a literary practice if you lack access to capital”. Tan’s debut essay collection, Peripathetic , has sold over 2,000 copies but hasn’t passed the threshold where she receives royalties.
“It doesn’t bother me that someone is downloading my book for free, but it bothers me to think about how much the publishing industry makes off the backs of knowledge workers,” she says. Meta’s craven use of the LibGen database may have a material impact on the livelihoods of some Australian writers, but most Australian writers are grappling with more immediate threats to their capacity to make art. As the class action against Meta inches forward, generative writing tools will likely become more sophisticated.
Writers and their advocates will continue to call for forthright federal government intervention on this question — but who would blame them for pessimism? Whatever confidence the ALP won with its Creative Australia policy was squandered by its disgraceful treatment of Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino. The Albanese government has not proved to be much more responsive than its predecessors to calls for investment in the country’s literary economy, whether through structural support for the publishing industry or direct funding of writers and literary organisations. Australian literature has for decades been woefully underfunded relative to other art forms.
Australia Reads has launched an impressive campaign, but there is no indication that arts policy is going to be an election issue, let alone support for writers. Meta’s theft matters, certainly, but let’s not let it obscure the immediate threats to a thriving literary culture in Australia. Are you worried about the AI theft of Australian writers’ work? We want to hear from you.
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