Hyde, M., & Osman, R. (Hosts). (2024, December 17). Lisa Nandy, tech bros & the Sephora crisis (Audio podcast episode). In The Rest Is Entertainment. Goalhanger Podcasts. https://www.globalplayer.com/podcasts/episodes/7Dro1yq/

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Mini-Review

I love The Rest Is Entertainment. It’s UK-centric, but immensely enjoyable if you like films, TV, books, music, radio, etc.

From 0.00 to 19.30 of this episode, there’s a very interesting discussion about UK copyright law and how AI LLMs (Large Language Models, e.g. ChatGPT) are scraping/harvesting authors’ work without any compensation. The UK wants tech companies to (shock! horror!) adhere to existing copyright law and to be transparent about what content has/has not been harvested. Outrageously, but predictably, tech companies do not want to do those fairly basic things. Can these rules actually be enforced, when they can just set up their servers somewhere in the world with laxer laws?

HarperCollins publishers have made a deal for some of their nonfiction backlist (and some fiction?) to be used to train LLMs. An AI ‘publishing’ company has been set up, but seems to be set on churn and burn. How long will it be before AI books start taking a place beside human authored books?

As Marina Hyde and Richard Osman observe: it’s the Wild West with AI right now. Well worth a listen, librarians.

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Image: screenshot taken on my phone. Other elements via Canva.

Images are used on this blog post under the “Fair dealing for criticism or review” provision of the Commonwealth Copyright Act, 1968.