The Latest on Writing and Publishing in Canada
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | LEGAL | FESTIVALS | MAGAZINES | PRIZES
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Apple the Latest Tech Firm to be Sued over AI Training
Many of the most successful corporations in the world are both heavily invested in artificial intelligence and recent targets of lawsuits concerning the use of pirated books for AI training. Tech giant Apple joins Meta, Microsoft, and Google as among companies now facing potential class-action suits over their large language models (LLMs). (Apple’s is called OpenELM.)
Two successful U.S. genre authors have brought suit in northern California, claiming Apple used the notorious Books3 dataset and other shadow libraries in its AI development work. If certified, this case is expected to test the recent Anthropic legal judgment that declared some copying of books in AI development to be fair use under US copyright law.
LEGAL
Anthropic AI Class Action Settlement Delayed
A major artificial intelligence training lawsuit in the United States was poised to be settled in early September, but has had its resolution postponed thanks to a judge’s ruling on the settlement agreement itself.
The case of Bartz v. Anthropic was a mixed bag of bad and good news for authors.
A summary judgement in late June from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California gave Anthropic retroactive permission to copy books it had purchased for use in training its LLM. Judge William Alsup ruled such use to be transformative enough to qualify for the U.S. fair use defence against infringement.
However, the same judge ruled that Anthropic’s earlier downloading of millions of books from known pirate websites was not a fair use, and left the company liable for potentially bankrupting damages. Rather than wait for a ruling on damages, Anthropic approached the legal team for the class and negotiated a U.S. $1.5 billion settlement agreement.
In September, The Writers’ Union of Canada sent a note to members explaining how they could register to be part of the class in the settlement. At a September 8th hearing, Judge Alsup refused to approve the settlement, and sent the legal teams out of court with some homework related to a final list of books eligible for the class. Should the teams fail to satisfy the judge, the case proceeds to trial in early December.
FESTIVALS
Eden Mills Festival Cancels Chatbot Appearance After Community Protest
The small town of Eden Mills Ontario has hosted an annual late summer, open air literary festival in its quaint downtown core for the past 36 years. With audiences sprawled on lawns, and a book market taking over much of the main street, Eden Mills Writers’ Festival (EMWF) is in many ways the epitome of analog, slow-paced, some might say old-fashioned appreciation of literature. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, the EMWF’s announcement that it had programmed an artificial intelligence chatbot as a panel guest for a critical discussion about AI and literature was met with alarm and passionate resistance from many in the literary community.
Social media outrage was vented. Open letters of protest sent. The EMWF backed down and disinvited the virtual entity known as Aiden Cinnamon Tea from its event (September 4-7).
A statement explaining the scheduling change was released on August 21st, just two weeks from the festival. Not quite a full-on apology, the statement did acknowledge that perhaps the community was not quite ready for an AI presence in the sunny meadows of southern Ontario. EMWF wrote:
This session was an experimental presence, intended to challenge automation logics, not perpetuate them. That said, we recognize that the way we communicated the “Dear AI, Am I Talking to Myself?” workshop missed the mark. We’ve received community feedback and made the decision to cancel the workshop and remove the AI voice from the panel of participants.
MAGAZINES
Canadian Literary Magazines Struggling Even as They Contribute Mightily
A new industry association called the Literary Magazines Canada Collective (LMCC) spun off from the larger Magazines Canada in 2023. As a first project, the LMCC has released a report on the state of literary magazines in Canada; it is an in-depth profile of the health of the sector based on a 2024 survey of LMCC members.
While the overall picture for Canadian literary magazines is not pretty — financial struggles are the rule, with over half of responding magazines reporting annual revenue of zero to $15,000 — the sector’s contribution to writing is significant. Like most cultural ventures in Canada, it would appear literary magazines punch well above their weight class.
The report estimates upwards of 4,000 authors per year are published across the collective’s membership and that $250,000 to $500,000 in contributor fees are paid to those writers. Given that only around 20 percent of Canada’s litmags have paid staff, this shows a volunteer infrastructure as strong as it is delicate.
Submissions to Canada’s literary magazines have increased a whopping 73 percent over the last five years alone, which may represent a pandemic effect.
PRIZES
McGill’s Cundill History Prize Announces Preliminary Shortlist
In an interesting innovation, McGill University’s Cundill History Prize has cut a 400-book submission pool to a longlist of 15 books, then a shortlist of eight, which will eventually be whittled down further to three finalists before the prize winner is announced October 30th as part of the Cundill History Prize Festival at the university.
As festivals and prizes around the country struggle with reduced sponsorship and an attendant attention deficit, drawing out the selection process one more stage gives lucky books and authors another strong chance for media and commercial attention.
This year’s shortlist, sadly, does not contain any Canadian books.
