Juicy Licensing Deals With AI Companies Show That Publishers Don’t Actually Care About Creators

One of the many interesting aspects of the current enthusiasm for generative AI is the way that it has electrified the formerly rather sleepy world of copyright. Where before publishers thought they had successfully locked down more or less everything digital with copyright, they now find themselves confronted with deep-pocketed companies – both established ones like Google and Microsoft, and newer ones like OpenAI – that want to overturn the previous norms of using copyright material. In particular, the latter group want to train their AI systems on huge quantities of text, images, videos and sounds.

As Walled Culture has reported, this has led to a spate of lawsuits from the copyright world, desperate to retain their control over digital material. They have framed this as an act of solidarity with the poor exploited creators. It’s a shrewd move, and one that seems to be gaining traction. Lots of writers and artists think they are being robbed of something by Big AI, even though that view is based on a misunderstanding of how generative AI works. However, in the light of stories like one in The Bookseller, they might want to reconsider their views about who exactly is being evil here:

Academic publisher Wiley has revealed it is set to make $44 million (£33 million) from Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnerships that it is not giving authors the opportunity to opt-out from.

As to whether authors would share in that bounty:

A spokesperson confirmed that Wiley authors are set to receive remuneration for the licensing of their work based on their “contractual terms”.

That might mean they get nothing, if there is no explicit clause in their contract about sharing AI licensing income. For example, here’s what is happening with the publisher Taylor & Francis:

In July, authors hit out another academic publisher, Taylor & Francis, the parent company of Routledge, over an AI deal with Microsoft worth $10 million, claiming they were not given the opportunity to opt out and are receiving no extra payment for the use of their research by the tech company. T&F later confirmed it was set to make $75 million from two AI partnership deals.

It’s not just in the world of academic publishing that deals are being struck. Back in July, Forbes reported on a “flurry of AI licensing activity”:

The most active area for individual deals right now by far—judging from publicly known deals—is news and journalism. Over the past year, organizations including Vox Media (parent of New York magazine, The Verge, and Eater), News Corp (Wall Street Journal, New York Post, The Times (London)), Dotdash Meredith (People, Entertainment Weekly, InStyle), Time, The Atlantic, Financial Times, and European giants such as Le Monde of France, Axel Springer of Germany, and Prisa Media of Spain have each made licensing deals with OpenAI.

In the absence of any public promises to pass on some of the money these licensing deals will bring, it is not unreasonable to assume that journalists won’t be seeing much if any of it, just as they aren’t seeing much from the link tax.

The increasing number of such licensing deals between publishers and AI companies shows that the former aren’t really too worried about the latter ingesting huge quantities of material for training their AI systems, provided they get paid. And the fact that there is no sign of this money being passed on in its entirety to the people who actually created that material, also confirms that publishers don’t really care about creators. In other words, it’s pretty much what was the status quo before generative AI came along. For doing nothing, the intermediaries are extracting money from the digital giants by invoking the creators and their copyrights. Those creators do all the work, but once again see little to no benefit from the deals that are being signed behind closed doors.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published on Walled Culture.