Publisher HarperCollins will allow some of its titles to be used to train AI models, with the permission of authors.
The company “has reached an agreement with an artificial intelligence technology company to allow limited use of select nonfiction backlist titles for training AI models to improve model quality and performance”, it said in a statement shared with the Guardian.
“While we believe this deal is attractive, we respect the various views of our authors, and they have the choice to opt in to the agreement or to pass on the opportunity,” it added.
The move comes after US children’s author Daniel Kibblesmith revealed last week that he had been offered $2,500 (£2,000)for permission to use one of his books published by HarperCollins to train AI models.
Kibblesmith published a series of screenshots of an email from the agency that represented his 2017 book Santa’s Husband in a post on the social media site Bluesky. The email states that titles would be licensed for three years, “with certain protections concerning credit and limits of verbatim usage per AI response”.
According to the email, the terms are non-negotiable and have been “agreed to by several hundred authors”. It also says that HarperCollins has been required to keep the “company’s identify [sic] confidential”, but that the agency has “good reason to believe it is a major and respected company”.
While HarperCollins says that the deal will involve nonfiction titles, the book Kibblesmith was approached about, Santa’s Husband, is a children’s fiction book.
“HarperCollins has a long history of innovation and experimentation with new business models,” the company said in its statement. “Part of our role is to present authors with opportunities for their consideration while simultaneously protecting the underlying value of their works and our shared revenue and royalty streams. This agreement, with its limited scope and clear guardrails around model output that respects authors’ rights, does that.”
In a follow-up to the screenshots, Kibblesmith encouraged people to “direct any outrage toward the incredibly doable action of purchasing physical books by living authors from local bookstores.”
In April, it was announced that HarperCollins would partner with AI audio company ElevenLabs to produce audiobooks for its foreign language business that would not otherwise be created.
At the time, the publisher said that while it would “continue to devote time and resources to voice actor-led productions”, AI would be “leveraged as a complementary tool to enable a broader number of audiobooks for backlist series books in non-English markets”.
