On Friday, author Daniel Kibblesmith posted a series of screenshots on Bluesky in order to share a concerning email he received from the agency who’d repped him on his children’s book Santa’s Husband: the book’s publisher, HarperCollins, was offering $2,500 (non-negotiable) for the right to use the book in an AI training deal that they’d signed with an anonymous “large tech company.”
Kibblesmith told them no in clear and immediate terms, but here are the screenshots of the offer—they’re worth reading for yourself.
To call this bleak is an understatement. “And of course there is concern that these AI models may one day make us all obsolete” is a truly absurd line to hear out of a publisher engaged in actively feeding one such AI model and I’m struck (to put it gently) by the classic union-busting energy of “These terms have already been negotiated… and agreed to by several hundred authors, so individual negotiation at this point isn’t possible.” And a $2,500 flat fee—per title, so really it’s $1,250 to Daniel and $1,250 to his illustrator on this book—is an insultingly small amount for *checks notes* the entirety of your intellectual property to be chewed and regurgitated ad nauseam for as long as there’s a greedy capitalist there to push the “generate” button.
If you couldn’t tell, I’m worked up about this and while I know that there is a lot to be worked up about right now… this is the moment and we have to deal with it now or we’re—not to put too fine a point on it—fucked.
If you are a HarperCollins writer, I suggest getting on the horn to your agent immediately and getting them to preemptively tell HC (and any/every publisher!) that your work will never be available to train LLMs or other AI processes. We’re not going to be able to rely on the courts to protect us, seeing as the Authors Guild suit against OpenAI has already been partially defanged by a California judge and anyway the idea of relying on the good graces of supposedly-impartial judges has taken a real credibility hit in the last few years. As long as publishers and tech companies continue to chase the last highs of late capitalism, they are going to try to squeeze every last profit margin for whatever they can get—they’re already cutting corners on print quality and laying off staff while overworking those who remain, so it makes sense that they’d be willing to cut authors out of the equation altogether.
The next few years are going to be a real test of the writing community’s solidarity. We—readers, writers, those who enjoy the ineffably human quality of art in any medium—must must must stay strong in the face of increasing pressure from the people who control our livelihoods and our access to art. Tell authors you like that they shouldn’t license their work for this shit. Tell publishers (or tell your indie bookstores to tell publishers) you won’t buy their books if they license them to AI training. Embrace the human, the slow, the strange—and maybe, just maybe, we’ll make a world worth continuing.
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