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This is magnificent!! I withdrew from contractual negotiations with a major academic publisher earlier in the year because they wouldn‘t revise the offered contract to prohibit AI use of my work. It’s extremely heartening to hear of others having success with these kind of clauses, bravo!!

Side question but why are you called proprietor and not author here?

Might be overly broad. The 'magic wand' tool in photoshop is technically AI. Though it is old school AI, not GenAI.

Not for GenAI, nope. For AI derived tools that make the creative process easier, sure. As long as the tool is not the result of a LLM full of other people’s work.

How "Artificial Intelligence" defined in the contract?

Btw, great books. Some fun, some important, and weirdly, never see which coming while I’m reading them. I thought MOON was just a funny bit of fluff, yet the end had me tearing up and full-hearted. Btw, Cincy&Toledo guy here.

If the e-book is available to Amazon or GoogleBooks, then their LLM web-spider/content-scrapers will have it in their knowledge base less than a second later. Sad but true.

📌

Should emulate tour riders and include “each royalty check shall be accompanied by five (5) green M&Ms”.

Thnx.

The irony is that we’re now spending more human energy legally defining "human" than we ever did actually being human. We've reached the "Proof of Personhood" era of literature.

Thanks! I'm going to bag that and reuse in other areas. (if I may...)

I’d prefer if it had a mention of obliteration via space laser if they so much as consider it, but other than that it’s pretty solid 😌

Hey - I'm putting together a website for advice on these kinds of clauses, would you mind me using yours as an example on it?

Thank you for sharing. Also, thank you for standing firm. Also, thank you for writing such delightful stories. I read Old Man's War ten years ago and recommended it to my spouse. I think it helped our marraige 🤣 he pays a little more attention to my recs now... except when it comes to burritos.

Thanks for posting the clause! I’m going to ask that something similar is included in my contracts, as well.

Yup. Already an event I was appearing at used my assets provided including pro headshots in generative slop promo that made changes to my actual face. I was careful w all the media terms but did not foresee something as unethical as that esp. after the clear character of the multimedia limits I set

That is a fantastic way to get sued for malpractice if you're a lawyer, and to get prosecuted for unauthorized practice of law if you're not. But hey, you do you. This isn't legal advice, either. It is a public statement made purely for educational purposes. FUCK AI.

I'm also curious how this interacts with promotion and pricing; specifically the possible use of machine learning models (including non-generative AI) that may go into such business practices in less direct ways.

One thing left out seems to be advertising.

Saving for reasons Thank you for sharing this

Reading the updated contracts . . .

Excellent. Using AI to produce text at any level (other than basic translation for practical purposes) is a moral failure.

In support of this, however, as a designer, I am wondering how this wording plays out in terms of the creating art part, as industry standard Adobe is riddled with AI powered/involved features of various scope. Does this mean something like Adobe can't be used to create art for you at all?

Happy day Juliette Wade If you can please remember me Share post 🥲💔

Oooh! "The Propietor"!!! Two words: Fan. Cy. 😉

fun (by which I mean not fun at all) to see people in these replies giving corrections and suggestions, as if Scalzi's contracts aren't already both lawyer and Krissy approved.

Because Scalzi makes them millions And if they want to dicover new Scalzis they can't drive them off by basically saying we're stealing your work

Body of work aside, I bet if you come at everyone else in life with this tone and five question marks per sentence you have a harder time negotiating contracts than John does.

It comes down to a business decision. If they accept the terms, the publisher makes a bit less money. If they reject the terms and the author takes the book to another publisher, they get nothing. The publisher needs to decide if they want to go for a sure thing, or take a risk.

High five fellow night owl! (I say I won't speak before 12 noon unless jet lag is in my favor... 😅)

#goals 😂

The difficulty of cracking into publishing obscures for some people the obvious truth that publishers need all their human writers badly. They do not and never have controlled supply. Neither has AI.

I think his doubt is because while publishers won't make any [noticeable] money on AI books, they *could* make money on licensing books for training, and they *could possibly* save money by having LLMs do some aspects of the publishing process instead of humans.

Why wouldn't they? They want to publish the book, don't they? As a writer, your maximum leverage is at the moment when the publisher has decided they want your work, but you haven't yet signed the contract. They've said "yes," but you can still say "no."

Plenty of publishers have committed to 100% human. I work for one. It is wonderful.

This 100%. If you know your worth and the other party needs or wants what you have to offer, that gives you tons of leverage.

Do you also have contract language requiring the publisher to sell you the remainders, if there are any?

If they want a good product, no AI is a good policy, obviously.

Yeah but you had Krissy. Unfair advantage.

I have added similar clauses to my contracts. You should always negotiate your contracts, politely but firmly. And you'd be surprised how often boilerplate is changed. It's also my personal experience that the people I have dealt with have been eager to add clauses roughly to this effect.

Why wouldn't they? What advantage would they gain by rejecting these basic protections of their author's rights?

Also also, for some certain people, they want to be able to have that person's name on their marketing materials, so they agree to their terms.

No, this is wrong. I both demanded and got changes to contracts even as a beginning novelist. The publisher has a standard contract, yes. It's the basis of negotiation. But any writer can ask for changes, and any writer can demand things not in the contract. And should, if they're important.

ANY terms in a distribution agreement. That's all a book deal is... a distribution agreement. Yeah yeah yeah... without writers pubs can't exist, but ... welcome to capitalism.

They’ll jump in the slop river if they think there is a dollar in it.

Because they can read the room a whole lot better than, say, you.

Thank you for posting that, John. Saved it for future reference.

Your clause likely fails on verification: "human-made" is unprovable at scale. How do you audit against covert LLM use in editing or cover design?

Indeed. It’s really important that people know it is a violation to upload/paste someone else’s work to an llm or to anything crawlable bc it exposes us to theft and infringement. (And as usual per web2 is a forced wealth transfer from creative laborers to big business/assholes)

This!!

very US-based but informative www.navigantlaw.com/effort-claus...

None so far.

They'd have to argue over their own marketing team who advertised it as AI.

King shit

Excellent stuff, thank you.

hi, @scalzi.com ! i enjoy your work and appreciate that you shared this.

Aaaaand saved. Thanks!

I only read books by Authourbot 5000™ these days anyway.

That's not very sci-fi...

What about superior intelligence, they're foxy that way.

YES!

Best Efforts is actually a legal phrase that has an EXTREMELY high bar. www.navigantlaw.com/effort-claus...

Thanks for sharing 🖖

I believe this needs to be amended because the orange idiot says it's now 'Super Intelligence.' I imagine this was proposed to offer a loophole guy contract language saying 'Artificial' and since it is in an executive order it's not exactly law, but could still offer a publisher an out in court

I have a forager friend who's working on a book, and his revised manuscript was so hashed over by the publisher that he suspected AI editing. His corrections had been removed, new errors introduced, photos and captions jumbled. And he knows AI fakes will hit Amazon as soon as it's published.

Oh hell yeah!! Thank you for outlining this @scalzi.com. I'm a massive fan of your work too and would hate for it to be ruined by AI.

As a querying author atm... *Saves for later*

Saving that in case I get published down the line!

Thank you!

Bravo!

You neglected the clause telling them they can't use AI to look for loopholes in the contract 🤪

do you have a definitions section where you define "ai"? if so, would you mind posting that too?

Bravo!

Thanks! I intend to ask for this in any future contracts so I'll save this to show to my agent.

Contra proferentem will apply if the contract is contested so the text limitation is interesting, but could be some artefact of US law that I'm not familiar with.

Like half the damn books on Amazon now are written with AI its insane.

Thanks for sharing this

Thank you. Very useful.

In reality, there's probably not much your publisher can do to stop your books from being scraped, but at least it means they aren't allowed to do it themselves or to profit from it.

The audiobooks used to say "All rights reserved" or something now they are like "This work shall not be used in any artificial intelligence" its a weird marker of modern productions.

Neal Asher, who writes hard SF that features a future where AIs rule humanity and those who oppose their AI overlords are presented as clownish approximations to Bond villains, is languishing on this platform with less than 1000 followers. Not in tune with the zeitgeist?

Law suits. The answer is law suits. Companies don't like losing them, so they tend to comply with the terms of the contracts they sign.

Excellent!

Yes.

Thank you! We’re fighting for all of our clients to get anti-AI clauses in their contracts and it’s so great to know that some heavy-hitters are pushing it.

Thank you for doing that

Thanks, John, very helpful.

I’m hoping it’s ok to poach? As a publisher of RPGs it’s vital that no AI gets into our workflow.

This should be a standard. I'd also love to see a certificate service that ensures that a creative work (book, movie, videogame, whatever) is 100% human. (I've come by some fake or real ones, and their website was vibe-coded(!) — very bad intro, I must say.)

Many thanks for sharing this. I wanted this kind of language in a recent book contract. My publisher was onboard, but we were unsure about the best language to use. Having this as an example going forward is super helpful.

That's a good one, I need to save this so my own writing doesn't get screwed over