New organisation to ‘certify’ fair AI

In the US, the Association of American Publishers is among those supporting a new nonprofit organisation called Fairly Trained that aims to ‘certify fair training data use’ in generative AI, reports Publishers Weekly (PW).

‘There is a divide emerging between two types of generative AI companies: those who get the consent of training data providers, and those who don’t, claiming they have no legal obligation to do so,’ said Fairly Trained in a blog post. ‘We believe there are many consumers and companies who would prefer to work with generative AI companies who train on data provided with the consent of its creators.’

PW reports that Fairly Trained’s certification can be obtained for any generative AI model that doesn’t use any copyrighted work without a license and that, while licenses can be varied, certification will not be awarded to models that rely on a ‘fair use’ copyright exception or similar, ‘which is an indicator that rights-holders haven’t given consent for their work to be used in training.’

In related news, Veristage, a company cofounded by book publishing veterans Thomas Cox and Thomas Minkus, has launched Insight, an AI platform for book publishers that ‘offers AI tools, including large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude, to analyse documents and generate metrics, editorial and marketing assets, sales materials, and other content’ as well as including tools for extracting and describing images within a document, generating audiobooks, and downloading reports.

Category: International news