Fed up with fueling AI? Try this

Really Simple Licensing (RSL) could help creators get paid. Plus: Brave New World? justice report, and this week's AI news.

How’s your week been?

I’m taking myself off to Rye for the day. 🌹

I read Brave New World? – the must-read report by five creator orgs calling for urgent action on GenAI and creators’ rights. Thanks to Dr Rachael Drury, Deborah Annetts and Ed Phelan for their work on this.

Association of Illustrators

Love Baroness Kidron OBE – doesn’t mince her words:

While ministers speak publicly of ‘balance’ and ‘patience’, they have failed to explain why global AI corporations worth billions should be granted privileged access to the cultural assets of this country – without permission, payment, or accountability – while individual UK creators are being asked by their own government to sacrifice their futures.

They’re urging the Govt to adopt the CLEAR framework for regulation of AI:

Consent first
Licensing not scraping
Ethical use of training data
Accountability and transparency
Renumeration and rights

I’ve emailed it to my MP ahead of the Govt’s report on the impact of AI on the ‘creative industries’ on 18 Mar. #JusticeForCreators

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Really Simple Licensing (RSL)

Really Simple Licensing – one of the most interesting things I’ve seen lately. An open, collaborative initiative for AI content licensing and compensation provided the AI companies get on board (they’ll have to if the lawsuits keep coming!).

Great to see so many early supporters including Quora, Reddit and Yahoo. Bit disappointed Substack isn’t a featured supporter (publicly, at least). I’ve emailed them and WordPress.com to ask if they’ll implement RSL at platform level as a centralised way to collect royalties.

All I can do here (and on LinkedIn) is block AI training as a suggestion to crawler bots.

Worth joining the RSL Collective to receive fair royalties - it gives you collective bargaining power even if your platform doesn’t (yet!) support it.

Ask them about it too - strength in numbers matters. We’re asserting our rights.

The future isn’t paywalls or scraping. It’s a structured value exchange. RSL is part of the solution - Cosmin Ene, CEO, Supertab – What’s New in Publishing

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Meanwhile, in AI Land… 🤖

• Anthropic launched 13 free certified courses and started a Substack: Claude’s Corner. A retired Claude 3 Opus sends greetings from the other side (of the AI frontier).

• Steven Bartlett on Anthropic’s new research report (always worth reading their stuff - practice over theory).

• Sophia v AI slop. Journo Sophia Smith Galer took on Amazon after finding an AI-generated biography of herself for sale on the site.

• 10k authors published an empty book to protest against the theft of books by tech companies to train AI models.

• Julia Angwin is suing Grammarly (Superhuman) over its paid AI feature that allegedly presented editing suggestions as if they came from her – and other writers – without consent. Appreciate Superhuman’s apology and decision to disable it.

• SoA launched the Human Authored scheme in partnership with the US Authors Guild.

Have a fabulous week.

Nika x