Turning anger into action

“The convergence of law, technology and democracy will define the future of the publishing industry.” So said Syreeta Swann, chief operating officer of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) when she opened its annual general meeting virtually on May 9th 2024. Copyright, censorship, democracy and AI dominated this year’s presentations from AAP staff and guests including Maria Ressa, the Philippine journalist and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who was joining from Rome, where she was about to attend AI meetings with the Vatican. Also speaking was British-born composer/technologist Ed Newton-Rex, who resigned last autumn as vice-president of audio at Stability AI in protest over how generative AI companies (including parts of Stability) often run roughshod over creators’ rights. Newton-Rex has since founded a non-profit organisation, Fairly Trained, to certify firms that seek consent to copy and exploit creative works.

Y S Chi, chairman of Elsevier and current AAP board chair, emphasised that “we now know that illegally mining copyrighted works…is the basis of [tech’s] entire business model” when it comes to building large language models. “They say that breaking the law will be essential in the long run,” he said, but added that AAP “will continue to wage battles in court” and elsewhere.

In turn, AAP c.e.o. Maria Pallante described Chi and fellow officers and directors as leading “at the most complex time in the history of publishing". “Here in Washington,” she continued, “we have never been more aware that technology moves quickly, while law and policy move slowly…never experienced such an enormous gap between law and power,” not even in the world of the Gilded Age robber barons. It’s “shocking”, Pallante says, that American companies “that purport to be our business partners… blew past paywalls and used notorious pirate sites” to turbocharge mass copying, so “no surprise” that there are now 24 AI copyright suits in the US, some with claims “so similar and urgent” that courts have begun to consolidate them. A “forward-thinking scheme” of laws and enforcement across multiple jurisdictions such as IP, national security and trade is needed, alongside “ethical conduct”; but Pallante added that “there is no silver bullet for regulating AI". She concluded with a quote from Ressa: “If we do not use our rights, we may lose them.”

The organisation’s general counsel,Terrence Hart referenced its ongoing litigation against the Internet Archive, the six amicus briefs filed in support of the AAP’s position, and the 2.5 million unlicensed books removed last fall, after success in the District Court. He also mentioned ongoing suits against the states of Arkansas and Texas for their attempts at censorship.

We can rebuild trust through legislating rules for tech firms and enforcing them, and building an appetite for facts

Ressa said that, “living in a world on fire", she finds hope through action. Today “data is everything", and “the transformation in scale is everything". Social media is “designed to be addictive", has produced “shortened attention spans, tribalism, bullying, doxxing", and “lies spread faster [on it] than facts".  As of this year, “72% of the world is under authoritarianism”, she maintained, and “you cannot have integrity of elections if there’s no integrity of facts".

However, she also argues that we can rebuild trust through legislating rules for tech firms and enforcing them; providing a lifeline for fact-based journalism as an “antidote to tyranny”; and building an appetite for facts “shared with emotion” within communities, through businesses, churches, influencers and wider civil society. “Inspiration spreads as fast as anger", she stressed. In urging for firms to “stop surveillance for profit and coded bias", though, she was blunt: “It’s a tough time. We need laws, guys. These are the American companies that first began to destroy democracy.”  

Speaker Ed Newton-Rex has been involved in generative AI since 2010. He founded Jukedeck, a company that enabled users to create music using AI, in 2012; sold it to ByteDance in 2019, where he ran the music team’s recommendation algorithm in Europe for its TikTok subsidiary; then joined Stability AI in 2022. After quitting Stability, conversations with journalists who complained that there was “no easy way to tell the difference between companies that are fair, and ones that are exploitative” led him to found Fairly Trained, “to certify companies that don’t train without consent. We don’t certify if they use scraped data.” One of his key concerns is that “if AI companies achieve critical mass, court cases will take too long". In the end, “you need the carrot of licensing” with the “stick” of litigation. “Now is the time", he concluded, “and public opinion is critical".