Ensuring writers are paid in the age of AI

When we consulted our members in 2024, you told us that you wanted to be paid when your works had been used by AI and that you would support efforts to develop licensing solutions to make that possible.

We heard you. Since then, we’ve been working with our partners to develop practical solutions that create opportunities for writers to be paid. We want to demonstrate that, in the age of generative AI, collective licensing remains an effective and pragmatic way of securing fair payment for writers.

First payments for works used to prompt AI 

I’m delighted to report that, following updates to licences offered by the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) last year, we have collected the first income from licensed workplace uses of AI.  This money will be paid to members in next month’s distribution.

These licence updates introduced permissions for AI prompting. This means that when employees in licensed workplaces use legally acquired material from licensed works to prompt AI models, the authors of those works will receive payment.

For example, an employee may copy a passage from a book into an AI tool and ask it to provide a summary. However, this permission does not cover the use of that book to train the AI model itself.

This is the first income ALCS has collected specifically for AI-related uses, and it is an important milestone that should be celebrated as we strive to ensure authors are paid wherever their works are used.

Prompting and training:  what’s the difference?

Prompting occurs when a user of the AI model includes copyright material as part of their query or instruction. In this case, the licensee is an organisation that holds a CLA business or public sector licence with Workplace Generative AI permissions.

Training involves the use of published works to train, fine-tune or augment an AI model. The licensees for training would therefore be organisations that operate or develop AI models. One example would be a medical research body working in life sciences seeking to train an AI system on relevant academic published content to provide intelligence to researchers or others working in that field. This would require a separate licence covering AI training.

An AI training licence

The use of published works to train AI models, creating businesses worth billions in the process, without rightsholders’ permission or payment from rightsholders has rightly caused widespread condemnation from across the writing community.

We recognise that, whilst the majority of our members simply want to be paid for the use of their work, others hold differing views and may want nothing to do with generative AI. That is why we have placed member choice and control at the heart of our approach to licensing AI training.

As previously announced, ALCS has worked with the CLA and Publishers’ Licensing Services (PLS) to develop a first-of-its-kind licence designed to pay writers when their works are used to train AI models.

Unlike other CLA licences that ALCS receives money for, participation in this training licence is on an entirely opt-in basis, meaning that only books specifically opted in by both their author and publisher will be included in the licence repertoire.

If your publisher has signed up to the scheme, we will be in touch to direct you to the Preference Centre within the ALCS website, where you can decide, on a work-by-work basis or for all of your works at once, whether you want them to be included.

If you don’t opt in, your works won’t be included in the licence repertoire. Unfortunately, this doesn’t guarantee that AI companies will never use your work. It has become clear that some AI companies have used writers’ works to train their models, regardless of whether they have permission or have a licence in place. Indeed, many works have already been ingested by AI models for training, sometimes through pirated sources, as we saw with the Anthropic case in the US.

If you wish to participate in this licence, but haven’t heard from us, consider speaking to your publisher to see if they are signing up through PLS. If they are a member of PLS, they will be able to find more information on participating in the licence here.

Together, these two initiatives demonstrate that collective licensing can continue to secure payments for writers as technologies and uses evolve. More information about the two different AI licensing schemes currently in operation including FAQs can be found here.