Many writers and agents were shocked last week when Melbourne publisher Black Inc Books formally asked its authors to agree to their work being used to train artificial intelligence (AI) and given just days to sign. The request comes only a few months after the Senate Select Committee on Adopting AI released its final list of recommendations, ostensibly designed to protect Australian creators.
According to an investigation by The Guardian, writers were asked to grant Black Inc “the right to reproduce or use, adapt and exploit the work in connection with the development of any software program, including, without limitation, training, testing, validation and the deployment of a machine learning or generative artificial intelligence system”. The publisher was set to split the net receipts with the author 50/50.
