Following a recent Congressional hearing on AI, Senators Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal proposed the AI Accountability and Personal Data Protection Act, in part to “hold Big Tech companies accountable for illegally pirating creators’ copyrighted works to train their artificial intelligence (AI) models.” The legislation applies to both training and generation of material.
A second bill co-sponsored by Hawley, the Transparency and Responsibility for Artificial Intelligence Networks (TRAIN) Act, would allow rights holders to access training records of AI companies to determine if their works were used to train the AI models. Multiple organizations endorse the bill, including the Authors Guild, the AFL-CIO, ASCAP, and SAG-AFTRA. Learn more.
Meanwhile, the White House has released an AI Action Plan that makes no mention of such accountability or protecting copyrighted works. In his informal remarks about the plan, which makes no mention of intellectual property, Trump said that paying for training materials is not doable for AI companies. Timothy B. Lee offers a measured analysis of the situation.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
