AI licences

Generative AI systems, such as ChatGPT or Gemini, produce responses to questions and instructions (prompts) provided by users. These systems can do this because they have been trained to recognise words and patterns of words. The training process involves the ingestion into the system of millions of documents. In a sense, words are the fuel that power such systems. Many of the works used in the training process are authors’ copyright-protected works and we are therefore exploring possible licensing models to enable authors to control and benefit from this use of their works.

There are two options that are currently being explored as models that we would like members’ opinions on, these are:

A licence permitting content from written works (books/articles/scripts etc) to be used to PROMPT AI systems
A licence permitting written works (books/articles/scripts etc) to be used to TRAIN AI systems

A licence to PROMPT

The PROMPT licence

A prompt licence would allow a user in a workplace (for example in a law firm) to put ALCS members’ work into AI as a PROMPT.

A user from an organisation inputs a PROMPT to a tool such as Co-pilot and receives an output.

An example prompt: Here is an article I’ve read, please summarise the key points for me.

People working for licensed organisations could use extracts from ALCS Members’ works (such as a chapter from a book or an article) as a PROMPT in an AI system.

A prompt in an AI system is an input – a type of instruction. If you have used an AI tool such as ChatGPT, you may have written a prompt yourself such as ‘write me a birthday poem for my dog’. And then you get a result (possibly a not very good one).

A practical example of how members’ works could be used as a prompt in a workplace is that an organisation could input an extract from a book on economics (that they owned) into an AI system, and then ask the system to summarise the key points of that chapter for them, so that they didn’t have to read it all.

The prompt license wouldn’t allow the inputted work to be used to train the system that is summarising the work, it would only allow the work to be used to generate an answer from that system.

A licence to TRAIN

The TRAINING licence

A training licence would allow a user from an organisation (such as Open AI) to put ALCS members’ work into AI and TRAIN it and use the work as ‘fuel’ to help AI systems to work.

This machine POWERS the ability of the AI tool to respond to a prompt – it’s like an engine that needs fuel. And words and images are the fuel.

With this licence, members’ works would be used to TRAIN the AI system itself. The work would be used, alongside thousands of others, to train the system to recognise patterns of words, so that it can then output fully formed sentences in response to user prompts.

AI systems are only as good as the information that is used to train them, so organisations are looking to train their AI systems on the best source material that they can.

While at this stage of the licence development process it is difficult to accurately quantify the achievable scale of licence fees, we will share more details on this as they emerge.

Complete the survey here.