A publishing company keeps badgering me to sign a “licensing agreement” for a book I already published both in hardback and paperback.
I’m very overwhelmed right now. Tomorrow I have another live taping. I have 4 trips, 2 of them international, before New Year’s. Zero words written for the conference talks I’ll deliver. The start of the academic year is kicking my ass. I have a record number of student researchers I supervise.
In short, I have no time for the publisher who’s obsessed with the book I wrote three books ago. But finally I got tired and asked them to explain what they want from me. With a lot of hemming and hawing, the dirty rotten bastards finally confessed….
….. wait for it…..
…. that they want to use my book to train their stupid AI model.
I haven’t responded yet because every email I start begins with intricate Russian curse words. I’m trying to cool down because all I want to do right now is send these people to the place that you can only describe well with intricate Russian curse words.
Speaking of which, I have extraordinary Russian cursing skills and nobody to display them to because everybody I know is too refined for such outrageous profanity.
Clarissa's Blog 
So what they proposed to pay you for feeding your work to the AI? Can you ask them for some outrageous amount of money for this privilege?
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At least you’re getting paid. OpenAI is currently facing a lawsuit by authors whose work they datamined without their permission. And Anthropic settled a similar lawsuit recently for $1.5B, which is a pittance if you ask me.
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Aaron Swartz took his own life because the state hounded him mercilessly for daring to make JSTOR papers freely available to the public. OpenAI, a for-profit company, mines all those papers (plus everything else the world has produced in terms of knowledge) for free.
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Nick is talking about Charlie. I’m about to cry. It’s very touching.
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I’m at work (Korea time). I’ll listen to it tonight when I get home.
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