With the rise of books written by AI (see here for example), we feel we have an obligation to our reader’s to provide some assurances the book they are spending their hard earned cash on was written by a human brain, heart, and hand. To this end, we will be adding a new clause to our contracts wherein our author’s will affirm the manuscript they have submitted for publication was not machine generated. Violations of this clause will be considered breach of contract, and subject to the laws of the state of New Hampshire. We understand programs and apps such as Prowriting Aid, Grammarly, Autocrit and such are useful tools when checking for spelling, punctuation, or grammar errors, and as such will not be covered by this clause.
Furthermore, to assure our author’s we will not allow their work to be used to train AI, we will add the following clause recommended by The Authors Guild:
No Generative AI Training Use.
For avoidance of doubt, Author reserves the rights, and [Publisher/Platform] has no rights to, reproduce and/or otherwise use the Work in any manner for purposes of training artificial intelligence technologies to generate text, including without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as the Work, unless [Publisher/Platform] obtains Author’s specific and express permission to do so. Nor does [Publisher/Platform] have the right to sublicense others to reproduce and/or otherwise use the Work in any manner for purposes of training artificial intelligence technologies to generate text without Author’s specific and express permission.
We are also in the process of changing our standard contract to align with the guidelines suggested by The Authors Guild, though ours will have a higher royalty rate than suggested by the Guild.
Please rest assured we will do everything we can to combat machine generated books, and protect our readers, authors , and ourselves from charlatans and swindlers who see AI as a way to a quick buck or acclaim as a novelist
We thank you for your time, and for your passion for the written word.
Cheers,
David Lugo, Manager and the entire Spinning Monkey team