Privileging AI over people

Many of you will have seen that the Internet Archive lost an appeal against publishers recently. This related specifically to their National Emergency Library project when, during the pandemic, they removed the loaning cap on digital copies of books they had scanned. Remember, this was during the pandemic, when people couldn’t access physical copies, and many commercial publishers were effectively engaged in price gouging of digital copies. Access to some 500,000 books has been removed.

I suppose I have some sympathy with authors who may be losing income as a result, and some of the digital-print analogies break down around copying a physical book and making it available to everyone, but this can also be seen as part of a wider desire to lock down all content, and concerns about the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine have also been raised.

My point here however, is not to focus on the details of the case, I don’t know enough about copyright law to do that. Rather, I find it interesting in relation to the recent access agreements with publishers and large language model AI developers such as Microsoft. We are entering a strange world where we, as, you know, actual human beings, cannot access knowledge freely, but AI can. The Wired article quotes, Dave Hansen, executive director of the Author’s Alliance saying: “Authors are researchers. Authors are readers, IA’s digital library helps those authors create new works and supports their interests in seeing their works be read. This ruling may benefit the bottom line of the largest publishers and most prominent authors, but for most it will end up harming more than it will help.”

These two conflicting decisions – restricting human access while simultaneously opening up AI access – seem to be privileging AI creativity over that of human endeavours. If that is a significant marker of a trend, then that doesn’t seem like a good direction.

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