The party crashers

At the turn of the century a company called Napster launched a service that allowed music lovers to share downloaded tunes via a peer-to-peer online network. The company was sued by copyright owners, and ultimately filed for bankruptcy just three years after its founding. Although Napster’s business was ultimately shut down, its influence over how music is listened to was profound. Its heirs, iTunes and Spotify, benefited from a habit change that Napster first signalled.

From our point of view, the lessons from Napster were gleaned more than a decade ago. When publishers were threatened with online piracy, their adoption of e-reader technology, led by Amazon, Microsoft and Sony, helped establish a legitimate trading environment for published content distributed digitally. When Amazon accelerated the format shift with its low pricing, they moved to restrict the retailer’s ability to undercut print prices. Their approach to audio has so far been similar, adopting a form of subscription that listeners are drawn to, but on a restricted basis.

The advent of artificial intelligence brings a fresh challenge, however. As far as this change goes, we are back in the Napster phase. We can see the contours, but can’t quite yet see where it leads. Last month a number of authors—and others—launched an open letter opposing the use of their material unfettered in the development of AI that might undermine their value. “The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted,” it read, following a similar pattern to past open letters, which I hope leads to some redress.

Putting Elon Musk at the heart of US president-elect Donald Trump’s new administration hardly calms nerves

But the opposition phase only takes us so far. Ultimately, the illegal music streaming service first pioneered in 1999 gave way to legal and sustainable alternatives. In the book business we see a bit of that too, with the deals cut by academic publishers an attempt to put a legal framework around what was already happening, unlicensed. We might put experiments in artificial voice and translation in the same bracket, with both Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, via its Dutch subsidiary, Veen Bosch & Keuning, signalling an intent to engage with the new tools, albeit on a limited basis. Such moves will continue—despite the legitimate criticism they draw—even alongside a wider commitment not to replace creatives with robots, and defend copyright.

There will be mistakes too: Penguin Michael Joseph has recently apologised to author Jodi Picoult for using an AI-generated image in marketing materials for her book By Any Other Name.

But the lesson from history is pretty clear. The technology will find its way, and will find plenty of users eager to use it, develop it and run with it regardless of the legal and ethical ramifications. Putting Elon Musk at the heart of US president-elect Donald Trump’s new adminstration hardly calms nerves in this respect. But a wider learning is important too. Technology pioneers will always want to crash our party and though some will bring with them a change of beat or a new dance, it’s our event and ultimately we should decide the tunes.