Hello everyone,

The previous conversations about AI terms being added to licenses was incredibly useful to read. I am writing to see if anyone is having success in having publishers moderate their desired prohibitions against the use of their products with AI tools.

We have been in discussions with a publisher wanting to insert language into a license for a product we are trying to renew that would prohibit the use of the product in combination with an artificial intelligence tool for a variety of things, such as training an algorithm or developing an AI tool, but also using any AI tool to do things like process or analyze.

We have pointed out that AI is being built into the tools researchers use, and everything is becoming an AI tool, broadly defined. Tools like Covidence advertise themselves as using AI, and researchers use that to process and analyze, etc.  And Microsoft is bringing their AI tool into things like MS Word--not to mention the very computers that we use to access this publisher product, with the announcements of AI being added into the MS and Apple OS roadmaps.

We have suggested language from the UC Berkeley Library sample TDM license, which provides helpful language around limiting the prohibition to AI tool use to create competing products, and we have suggested language preserving fair use rights. They simply are saying “no” to all that. In spite of my understanding that they are having to moderate their prohibitions in the EU.

So, if anyone has been successful in moderating that language, please share what is working.

(Also, as I know that representatives from major publishers follow this listserv, it would be great if you all would realize that license language saying that researchers at academic institutions cannot use your product with the AI tools that are becoming widely used in research, well, that is not matching reality. I get you all do not want the next ChatGPT-like product to be trained on your data without getting a piece of the profit, but there has to be room for faculty and students to get their work done. It is the only reason we license your products in the first place—and these new AI tools are helping them write the papers to be published in your journals.)

Thank you,

--matt

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