Trump's "broligarchy", writers' rights and TikTok returns?
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This episode of the Times Tech podcast is sponsored by Vanta. Let's talk about something that might be keeping you up at night, cybersecurity. According to Vanta's latest State of Trust report, it's the number one concern for UK businesses, and that's where Vanta comes in. Whether you're a startup, growing fast, or already established, Vanta can help you get ISO 27001 certified and more without the headaches.

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Because when it comes to your business, it's not just about keeping the lights on. It's about keeping everything secure. Danny, I'm a bit disappointed in you today. Oh, God. I feel like I'm talking to my mom now. Why? Hear me out. Every week, you appear on my screen in a new outfit. Last week, it was a helmet, clasping a sword. This week, you're looking a little bit different.

Well, under the weather. When's the last time you had strep throat? I'm not sure I've ever had it. I don't recommend it.

But here I am soldiering through for our audience. But I will say, as our producer always says, you know, it's always sunny in podcast land. I don't feel super sunny right now. I feel very overcast. I did wonder if it was another clever way of trying to get out of writing yet more thousands of words on TikTok for this weekend. No, that is a side benefit. That is a side benefit. Shall we?

Hello and welcome back to the Times Tech Podcast with me, Katie Prescott, here in the City of London. And me, Danny Fortson, in Silicon Valley, where Katie, we welcomed a new, old president, seemingly very cosy with big tech. Let's list those at the inauguration from the tech world, because it was completely fascinating to see just how many of the big tech guns were on the stage. So I'll give you a drumroll. Drumroll.

In alphabetical order, who was there? So we had Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, who at the time says, the man who is, quote, perhaps the most important to the future of the United States. I would add possibly the world. Yeah, exactly. Jeff Bezos and his wife, obviously founder of Amazon, Blue Origin, owner of the Washington Post. You had Shou Chu, CEO of TikTok.

And TikTok was, of course, banned the day before the inauguration and magically unbanned the day of the inauguration. But there's more on that later. It's a little tricky. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, also known as Tim Apple, as Trump once called him back in the day. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, you know, the parent company of Google, Waymo, etc.,

Elon Musk, obviously the founder of SpaceX, Tesla, owner of X, and hearing from President Trump that an American flag and people will soon be on Mars, will be planting flags on Mars. And lastly, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, which owns, of course, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads.

And possibly all of us. Of course, a person who banned Trump from Facebook four years ago after the storming of the Capitol, but now he's back. Quite a collection. There's one row of them that together worth more than a trillion dollars standing right behind the president for his inauguration. It was such a statement. It's going to be one of those photos that lives on forever.

And especially because they moved it inside, it was super cold. And all his supporters, all the MAGA faithful were left outside. Trump and his trillionaires. Exactly. It was interesting that President Biden, when he was giving his speech, his final speech was warning Trump.

He was saying that there's an oligarchy growing in America of extreme wealth, power and influence. And something we've been talking a lot about on the podcast is the kind of the rise of power around big tech, which just seems to get more and more consolidated in the hands of the few. And that image of them all lining up politically by Trump, as you say, a lot of allegiances have changed in recent months as well, particularly Mark Zuckerberg there.

it's really quite telling about what we might see over the coming years. And his views seem to flip on a dime as well. And so they really need to kiss the ring in order to make their views heard, which I've heard some people argue, and it'd be interesting to know what you think about this, that if Kamala Harris had won, perhaps there would have been less need to do that. Those people would not have been there. Those people would not have been there. We talked about the big names that were there.

Was there anyone that you think was missing?

from the big tech world in particular that really stood out. I mean, there's Jensen Huang from NVIDIA wasn't there, for example. Yeah, and Satya Nadella from Microsoft. And they may have been buzzing around DC and at various things, but they weren't at the main event, as far as I could see. Those are probably the two most surprising because those are the two other biggest figures in American tech right now. But I don't think we should read too much into that because, of course, we also have Stargate, right?

Are you guys excited about Stargate? It sounds like a sci-fi movie, but what's been the buzz of Stargate across the pond? Stargate hasn't reached me that much, but that's probably my fault because I haven't been covering it. So this is, we were talking last week about everything that we're doing here in the UK to put AI infrastructure in place. Stargate is the US plan. Is that right? Walk me through it. Yes, Stargate is the day after the inauguration.

President Trump announced this mega AI infrastructure plan called Stargate with OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, with the three main partners. And the idea is to invest $500 billion with a B.

I'm glad you clarified that. Yeah, exactly. $500 billion in U.S. AI data centers to build like a fleet of mega, mega AI data centers on U.S. soil as a kind of like raw,

We are America. Hear us roar. We are going to create this like, you know, this layer of infrastructure is going to be in America. We're going to build AI here. Which is very protectionist as well, because it means all of your information is going to be stored on shore. Well, this is a kind of an answer to what China is doing. They're also racing to build AI, AGI, super intelligence, whatever you want to call it.

But what was really interesting is that this whole kind of dance happening between big tech and Trump, you already saw the first fissures because, of course, $500 billion is a lot of money. They said, OK, we're going to do $100 billion in the first year. Like, still, that's a lot of money. Elon Musk comes out immediately and says, this is, quote unquote, fake. He's like, they don't have the money.

This is something that President Trump announced. He had Masayoshi Son, the founder of SoftBank, right there being like, Mr. President, we couldn't have done this without you. Big to do about it. Sam Altman from OpenAI said the same thing. And Elon Musk is just calling BS and being like, this ain't happening. They don't have the money. That's certainly something from Elon Musk, given that, you know, he helped put Trump in the White House, their best buddies. And then he, of course, gave that super bizarre speech.

With that very strange salute, et cetera, et cetera. He's had quite the week. But to basically come out on day two of the administration saying, this big announcement that you did, Mr. President, is not really what you're saying it is. You can see the headline, can't you? Tensions in Trump's trillionaires. Yeah. But the thing is, for example, OpenAI is one of the partners. It's come out that they are on the hook for $19 billion this year.

In their lifetime, they have raised $24 billion. They are losing billions of dollars. I don't know how it's all going to work. And Satya Nadella was like gently skeptical.

He's like, we're investing $80 billion by ourselves this year. He's like, we're good for our $80 billion. They're like, well, what do you think about Stargate? He's like, we're good for our $80 billion. He's just kind of like... And hasn't Microsoft said to OpenAI they can now use other cloud providers? So initially when Microsoft put billions into OpenAI, it was to do a deal so that they just use their data centers and now they can go elsewhere. And they've got money from SoftBank, OpenAI. So presumably SoftBank has sort of approved this deal.

This is where frenemies become enemies. You have Elon Musk over here and Masayoshi Son over here and Sam Altman over here and everybody's trying to...

carve out their land in this land grab and I just feel like it's gonna get really really interesting especially when you're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars being thrown around Stargate in a galaxy far far away Let's move on from the inauguration. Yes, and and all the pomp and ceremony. Um Afterwards Trump sat down behind that very famous desk in the Oval Office and he went through some paperwork and

And there was one particularly interesting executive order that the president scrawled his famous signature on. TikTok is back. It wasn't gone for long in the end, for you in America, I should add. Yeah, so when we were recording last week's episode, we were pretty sure that the ban on TikTok, which had been just to remind listeners, was passed by both parties and signed into law last April by Joe Biden. Huge bipartisan support.

that would force the company, ByteDance, the mother company, to either sell it within nine months or shut down in America. And we're pretty certain that, you know, January 19th, the day before the inauguration, that the ban was going to go through. And the Supreme Court upheld an 11th hour appeal from the company saying, nope, you have to abide by this new law. And so for about 12 hours,

TikTok went dark. So TikTok's chief exec, Sho Chu, posted online, where else but through a TikTok? Hi, everyone. It's Sho here. As you know, we have been fighting to protect the constitutional right to free speech for the more than 170 million Americans who use our platform every day to connect, create, discover, and achieve their dreams.

There we go. Thank you very much, President Trump, famous TikTok user, influencer. That was the video he put out like a day or two before the ban.

And then inauguration happens. And then they say, hey, we're back. Thank you to President Trump on their like little like welcome message. They are lavishing praise on President Trump for all their 170 million users. But what's not clear is that he even has the power to do this because an executive order doesn't necessarily override power.

a law on the books that has been approved by both parties and signed into law by the president. So it's a little bit like, okay, so are we just not enforcing the laws we don't like? Which is basically what this has been about. But anyway, what's obviously not said there is that the reason this ban was so heartily approved by both sides was that there's a growing conviction and some evidence

that TikTok is being used as a propaganda tool. In other words, there's a study done by some researchers at Rutgers and they were like, look, we analyzed posts about just the Chinese Communist Party and anything pro-Chinese CCP,

was over promoted and anything negative about the CCP was dramatically under promoted. And they compared it to YouTube and Instagram. And it was like an outlier by a large degree. They told me it was a weapon of mass indoctrination. This is the conviction inside the Pentagon and why especially people in the defense establishment would be like, look, no American app is allowed to operate in China.

Yet we have allowed this app that is owned by a Chinese company that is subject to certain controls by the CCP to become one of the most important sources of information and news. Very importantly, 40% of people under 30 get their news from TikTok.

And we're just like, you know, we're just letting them do what they want here. And we don't want, we've got to kind of call this. Although, of course, TikTok has always argued that this is not the case at all. Yes, they 100% deny all of this. They're just like, this is complete malarkey. We have put all these things in place to make sure that we remain completely independent and outside of the Chinese state control.

But obviously, again, people in the, especially in the defense world and in Congress just don't buy it. I have to say, one of the things I've really, really enjoyed about this story, which has been going on for such a long time now, and is still going on, it feels like we've kicked the can along the road again. Yes. So we'll be writing about it for many Sundays to come. But it's the movement of TikTok users onto this other Chinese app called Red Note. This is...

This is so funny. Have you used it? I have not. It's so good. I mean, I went down a rabbit hole, a bit like TikTok. It's very addictive. I spent a good hour on it earlier when I should have been preparing for this. So this is Xiaohongshu. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. Red note. And you go on it and it's unashamedly Chinese. So it's got Chinese characters when you open the app.

And the first things that popped up into my feed were welcome TikTok refugees videos from these really cool Chinese influencers who were like, hey, Americans, welcome to Chinese culture. And so if the aim of the TikTok ban was to try and kind of create a bigger divide between the US and China, it seems to have spectacularly failed because these videos with these very nice influencers are actually...

sort of seem to be doing more to encourage Chinese-American relations, Sino-American relations than anything I've seen for a while. There's one which says, do as the Romans do and don't do anything against Chinese law. I would suggest you first do as Romans do, OK? Don't do anything. Don't say anything against the Chinese law. You got to find the balance. And second, learn some Chinese. Not gonna lie, bro, I haven't seen any foreigners who can speak Chinese being broke.

There you go. It's a life lesson from Henry on Red Note. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, well, it's funny. It's just it's really an extraordinary turn of events. Because, of course, the other thing, just with the kind of going full circle on the TikTok thing, if you go back to 2020 and the waning months of the Trump presidency, he was the one who tried to ban it first.

He signed an executive order that started this almost exact same process, either sell or shut down. And it ended up being in this weird deal where they were going to create a new kind of entity. And it was going to be sold to a group made up of Walmart employees.

an oracle. And then it just kind of faded away by the time that Biden took office. And then Biden was kind of soft on TikTok, wasn't really thinking about it. And then this whole thing kind of bubbled up again. But it's just interesting that Trump, who once saw this as a, in his words, a threat to national security, now says he has a quote unquote warm spot for it. Because what did TikTok do last year? They did what Mark Zuckerberg did this month.

They relaxed their content moderation and they made a real big effort to make clear that that's what they were doing to the Trump team. And it was a key way for him to reach Gen Z. So all of a sudden, Trump thinks, actually, this has gone from a national security threat to this thing I have a quote unquote warm spot for.

And is it really your principle or is it just you're like, actually, this thing helped me get elected and now these guys are on my side. And that flip-flopping between where's his warm spot and whatever his whim is, is exactly why all of the trillionaires are lining up behind him, right? Correct. Because you want to be on the right side of the whim and you want to know where the warm spot is. That's all this talk of warm spot. Speaking of warm spots, the last thing on court of broligarchs

Zuckerberg has put a lot of money into painting TikTok as this threat because he sees it as the first real threat to his empire since Snapchat and Snapchat is not a threat anymore. And so they've put a lot of lobbying money in Washington to convince lawmakers that it is a threat, that they should be really worried about this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And now

Zuckerberg is in the tent, at least for now, but so is Sho Chu. And the question is, who's going to win that fight? But again, it's just going to be totally fascinating. I think it's going to be, there's going to be a lot of, you know, knives in the backs. I feel like we're talking about the court of Henry VIII.

It is like a court. It's absolutely like a court. Like who's the king's favorite today? And who's out of favor? I mean, Elon Musk, I think has to be the favorite because he spent $270 million of his own money and used an entire social media platform to help get him elected. But we've all studied history. We know what happens to favorites. Absolutely. I mean, hold on to your heads, boys, is what I would say. Yeah.

Right. Danny, I think we should take a break. Yes, a deserved break, which provides a great opportunity to tell listeners our address. Yeah. Have we got an address? Have we? Yeah, we do. How does that work? We're zooming into the future with an electronic mailbox, Katie. Oh, the phone. No, it's a mailbox. It's not a phone. God.

Right. Some of you do very kindly get in touch with us individually after the programs, but now we have got an email address for the show. So please do get in touch with your thoughts, feedback, questions, any ideas for interviews. We might not reply to everyone, but we will read them all. Also, they can leave voice messages now. Goodness me. Is that the future? It's the present. It's the present, sister. Still living in a medieval court.

And some of them, yeah, we will share on the show. So get your pen, your stylus, your thumb, your auto dictate, your AI bot at the ready. You can reach the show by emailing us at techpodatthetimes.co.uk. That's techpodatthetimes.co.uk. Great. And please don't email if you're an AI bot, actually. No, no bots. Too much of that.

This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by Vanta. Let's talk about something that might be keeping you up at night, cybersecurity. According to Vanta's latest State of Trust report, it's the number one concern for UK businesses, and that's where Vanta comes in. Whether you're a startup, growing fast, or already established, Vanta can help you get ISO 27001 certified and more without the headaches.

And Vanta allows your company to centralize security workflows, complete questionnaires up to five times faster and proactively manage vendor risk to help your team not only get compliant, but stay compliant. So stop stressing over cybersecurity and start focusing on growing your business in 2025. Check out Vanta and let them handle the tough stuff. Head to vanta.com forward slash the times tech to learn more.

Because when it comes to your business, it's not just about keeping the lights on. It's about keeping everything secure.

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Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment.

Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. Now, Katie, if I said YouTube for documents, how excited would you be? Not thrilled. Okay, how about this?

The Netflix of e-books. This is sales pitch for your new business or something. The Spotify for publishers. And still not really doing it for me. Okay, well, I'm not pitching you, but actually that's only because someone has already come up with all these ideas, not because they're not fantastic. But I've been speaking to Trip Adler.

who you might know as a co-founder of Scribd. Do you know what Scribd is? Yes, it's the document sharing app. Yes, it's basically the YouTube for documents. The company was founded, he founded this company back in 2007.

And users could, like on YouTube, upload and view documents on every topic imaginable. Think court filings, academic papers, whatever it may be. Then in 2009, they worked with authors to introduce e-books to their platform as well. I see where you're going with this. The Netflix of e-books. Yeah, exactly. So he left in 2024, but by then the company was bringing in $200 million in revenue annually.

And now Trip, who is one of Scribd's co-founders, has launched a new service that seeks to make sure authors are being paid by big AI companies using their work to train their models, which of course is a very big deal these days. Spotify for publishers. Actually, it's called Created by Humans. But you get the idea. You know, this is...

The whole idea of copyright and how these AI models are being trained and who's getting paid is very, very, very much a live issue and maybe one of the issues in AI right now. It is such a hot topic and it's fascinating because when we were all worrying about robots taking over the world, actually it's this far more mundane issue of who owns the data that's powering all these models, which has just become so important. And understandably...

so many in the creative industry are absolutely terrified about how the ship has already sailed for so many of them and that their information's already been used. And our organization has signed a deal with OpenAI to license our content as many other publishers have.

But the New York Times, for example, is in a lawsuit with Microsoft and OpenAI over their content being used. Getty Images is suing a British company called Stability AI over the use of their image copyright. So it is a massively hot topic. Yeah, and to your point, the real issue here is that, you know, the horse has bolted the barn and has already lived a very good life and been turned into glue. You know, it's like...

These AI models have already ingested the entire written internet and everything that humans have written and kind of sucked it up into their big machines. And so we're now being like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hold on a second. But I didn't give you permission for that. Let's go through the glue. Is that my horse in there? Exactly. Exactly.

Exactly. Um, and so it's very, very, very messy. And what's really interesting is that, you know, uh, trip who started this company who tried to kind of like help authors and writers put their stuff in a place where they could actually get money for it and people could access it and, you know, pay a subscription, et cetera. He's done this kind of thing before, but obviously the stakes now are far, far higher just because again, like we were saying at the top, um,

how much money is flowing into these AI companies and the data centers to run them and all the things that they're going to disrupt and all that stuff. And this is all built around

atop stuff that was created by humans. And we're waiting to see the results of some of those law cases, right? Because at the moment, no one's really come down on either side. Here in the UK, there's an idea bubbling that will mean content creators can opt out of having their information used, which they don't like very much. And that's all in consultation at the moment. But that's

No one's really come up with a great solution for this. No. And what's interesting is created by humans, they launched just –

a few days ago, actually, in the last fortnight, they've got 50 authors who have signed up from the start, including folks like Walter Isaacson, who was the biographer of Leonardo da Vinci and, of course, Elon Musk and some other prominent authors. And their hope is that, you know, this is the tiny acorn from which they grow into a mighty oak. But I think I've given a pretty good...

elevator pitch, if I do say so myself, especially in my diminished state. But I asked Trip to do so again for me. Created by Humans is a company that is working to solve all these tricky issues around how copyright works in an AI world. And we are doing that by creating a marketplace for AI rights so that creators can take full control over what content they want

showing up in AI and how it's used and select which rights they want to license. And then AI developers and AI companies can come and pull from this available set of content for AI licensing purposes. We're starting with books specifically. We think there's a lot of...

tough problems to be solved as it relates to books. And once we solve this for books, we can then expand to other kinds of content. And we should give the context, right? Because somewhere in one of the messages back and forth with, I think your investors are calling this a Spotify moment for publishers, which I thought it was an interesting framing. Because if you think about

The AI revolution that most people know about has started two years ago with Chad GPT, etc. And it was really like these models kind of just show up in the public consciousness and you're like, oh my gosh, these things are very powerful, but they were also trained on just like kind of everything.

And it's kind of like the Napster moment was two years ago of everybody being like, oh, there's these things, but they're just like taking everything they can get their hands on. Anything that's been written by a human, we're going to ingest into our model and use it to train them and not pay anyone for it or pay as little as possible. And that's that kind of the Napster piracy kind of model starts. And now what it sounds like you're trying to do is basically be like, no, no, let's like formalize this.

and figure out a way for me as a writer, as an author, whomever, to actually license my stuff and kind of create more of an infrastructure. Yeah, exactly. I think that's well said. You know, I think when Catchy PT came along, it was kind of like a Napster-like moment. And that, I think,

Consumers are really thrilled with the experience they're getting, but it wasn't being done in a way that the creators whose works were being used for training were happy with. The same way musicians were not pleased with the way Napster was sharing their songs for free. And then Spotify came and created a legitimate alternative where the labels and musicians were fully bought into it, and that also allowed them to build an even better experience for consumers.

And we see this as like a similar moment. There needs to be a paid licensing model in place and we're building that out. And we think once that is built out, that's going to allow AI companies to just build even better products. Because once they have access to the highest quality, newest books and other content from creators, and they have these licenses that can give them permission to do all sorts of things with that content.

I think AI experiences will be taken to the next level. So I think there's just this moment where this issue of copyright needs to be solved. And that's what we are working to do as Created by Humans. And just to go back to that, to the kind of the Napster slash Chad GPT moment, were you still running Scribd at the time?

Uh, I left Scribd, um, in October of 23. So I've been out, um, 15 months now. Um, so, so yeah, so I left that job after a 17 year run. Um, and 17 years. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. 17 years. That's a long run. That's like dinosaur style in Silicon Valley. Yeah. I mean, that was my, that was my first job, uh, in my life and now I'm on my second job.

So there's so many questions. One is like, is this going to work? The reason I ask is because, you know, these AI model companies, they've already sucked up all this information, right? And now it's like the horse has left the barn. It's running off into the field.

And you're like, no, no, no, wait, come back. You have to pay before you leave. What's in it for the AI companies? And why is this, why does this have a chance of even working? I mean, I don't think we're telling the horses to come back. I think we're telling them that they can run even faster and farther with this new model in place. So I think what we're doing is kind of building on top of what they've already done.

And I mean, yeah, this is a really tough thing to get working. I mean, just sorting out the rights on the content side is extremely challenging. And then we have to also sort out that model with the AI companies. And one of your partners in this endeavor is the Authors Guild of America, industry group for authors. Yeah, so the situation with books is that currently all these books are governed by all these author contracts that have been drafted and signed over the last, you know, many number of decades.

But one of these contracts actually mentioned AI. So when there's suddenly this AI opportunity, there's this question, well, who actually owns the AI rights? And the general view in the industry is there's multiple stakeholders. But if anyone really owns them, it's really the authors because they wrote the books and they are the primary owners of their AI rights. So that's why our product is very author-centric. We've partnered with the Authors Guild. And what our product

It mostly does. It allows authors to sign up and take control of their AI rights. What you're doing is kind of creating a kind of a marketplace effectively where if I've written 10 books, I can go on there and be like, all right, I'm Danny Fortson. This is who I am. I verify who I am. Be like, OK, these are my rights for the books. These are the books I want to kind of put into the pool. I set my rate as well.

Is that right? We're currently not offering that. The way it's going to work for now is you license the books to created by humans, and then we would bring bundles of those books to AI companies. Then we would pass those opportunities back to authors, and authors can opt in or out. We'll probably over time create a model where authors can set their own rate, but this whole space is so new and it's so the Wild West that we want to leave it as flexible as possible to figure this out.

But right now it's like, here's our stack of books, OpenAI, for example. You pay X and you can have access to these for your models. Exactly. And it could be a big company like OpenAI licensing everything, or it could be a startup or any company that just wants a small number of books. So we can imagine a future where maybe a startup's building a therapy app and they just want access to psychology books. And we would just give them a bundle of psychology books.

Or it could be, you know, a startup's building, they want to build personalized romance books, right? And that's, there's no, there's no right structure to do that right now. So they would come to us and they would license romance books with personalization rights. So we can create like these, these various bundles of, of content with rights. And this way we can kind of solve the different needs of these, of all these different AI developers and then, and then have a model for getting that, that revenue back to the authors behind the books.

How do publishers feel about this? Because as you say, you're going to the authors. And I know like Walter Isaacson, very famous biographer, he's involved in this project. He's an advisor and an investor. But you're going to the authors.

You're not going to the publishers, the ones who have actually done the deals, the original deals with the authors to get these things out into the world. Are they just like, yeah, yeah, we're good. We don't need any rights to this. It really involves all three parties. Like we're working with authors and publishers and AI companies. So that's why you really need a kind of an independent tech startup to solve this because you need to bring all these parties together. So it's another group is agents, too. They play a big role. So we're kind of bringing all these different parties together and we're building the software to bring all these parties together.

That's what makes this a challenging problem to solve. You know, one of the reasons AI companies said they were reluctant to license content is that the rights were just so complicated. And that's really largely what we're solving here is we're just making the rights simple. How do the AI companies feel about it? Because obviously the Authors Guild has sued OpenAI at least and maybe others as well because they're like, you're stealing our stuff to train these things. How do the AI model makers feel about what you're trying to do?

In general, the response has been very positive. I think they're all quite frustrated with the fact that a lot of creators and authors are unhappy in suing them. They also want to scale their data acquisition efforts and they find it challenging to do so. They want to get higher quality content. They want to have good relationships with content owners. And it's just a complicated thing. And I think, yeah, AI companies have generally been repulsed

really enthusiastic. Going back to the Spotify analogy, it's 20 years between when Napster came out and when the industry gets back to where the money it was making before that technology arrived. It's like a 20-year kind of winter, let's call it. And from knowing people in the book world, times are tough right now in the book world, the publishing world. Do you see a similar trend

period that we're entering in now where it's like really tough for a long time and maybe this gets us back to kind of a healthy place but it's going to be a long kind of torturous road i mean i think that uh things are moving faster than they used to um

I mean, in music, I think that the world was really kind of pretty surprised by the Napster moment, and it took a long time to kind of build out the model. Remember, there's iTunes first and then Spotify. There's a lot of stuff that happened. I think this can all be solved quite a bit quicker. I mean, if you look at how quickly, you know, Chachi PT came onto the scene and changed things, you know,

I think it can also be fixed relatively quickly once we solve the problem. So, I mean, who knows? Maybe this does take 20 years to solve the problem. I hope not. I don't think it will, but we're going to go as fast as I can. And I think we're, you know, the world moves pretty quickly these days. So I hope that if we get this right, we could solve it quicker than that. In this licensing model, have you thought about what that pricing might look like and how much would actually flow back to the people making this stuff? Like how is that pie divvied up?

So I think this is going to be one of the trickiest things to figure out. I mean, there's this big question of what human data is going to be worth in the AI world. And there are certainly some people who think it's going to be the most valuable resource in the world going forward. And there are some people who also think data should be free and people will train everything for free. And we kind of have these two extreme points of view.

And the answer is somewhere in the middle. And we don't actually know where that is yet. I think that's really what Created by Humans is going to discover. By creating this marketplace, what is the value of human data in an AI world? And we'll figure that out for books. And then we'll figure out other types of content next. But yeah, I mean, I think that's really the big question. And I think we're going to answer that by building this marketplace and kind of seeing where the numbers shake out. Do we understand how the big developers up to this point –

been accessing books, like that many books online. I mean, you have to ask someone at the companies in charge of that and it doesn't seem like an area people really want to talk about too much. Well, I would imagine also like through Scribd, right? If you have a...

premium subscription and you can get access to digital books, that might be the quickest way to do that. Yeah, I mean, I think the script was used quite a bit to train a lot of these AI systems from what I've heard. I think that also kind of helped inspire me a little bit to go down this path because we want to create a way for

AI developers do this, but with the full buy-in of rights holders. And I mean, when we started this, we started talking to authors and it was clearly pretty polarizing. I mean, there's some authors who really want to stay away from AI completely. And there are some who are really excited about this. But we've been able to identify 50 authors who are just really excited to share their books with AI companies. And then I guess the other thing is, the other question outstanding, which has yet to be determined, is this question, just the legal question, right? There's all these...

lawsuits happening, including New York Times against OpenAI, Authors Guild against OpenAI, going down the line. In the UK, there's Getty Images is suing Stability. All on this, and it seems like the question that has to be determined is this idea of fair use, of like, you know, this thing's out in the public domain.

And if I read a book as a human and then I get inspired and then come up with my own idea based on that book, that's quote unquote fair use as long as I'm not copying or plagiarizing. It's like the artist who gets inspired, you know, the painter gets inspired by the other painter. How important is the outcome?

of those lawsuits to what you guys are trying to do? Like, is it critical? Is it like right at the heart of how your business works or doesn't work or not? Yeah, I don't think it's the heart of what we do. I mean, if training is determined not to be fair use, I mean, that'll be more of a tailwind for us. But I think either way, there's a really good business to be built here.

When these AI companies were training and arguing it was fair use, the core of their argument was that since a human can read and learn for free and they can repeat what they learn, that AI systems should be able to do the same thing. And to address that idea, we created our own kind of philosophy around this, which we call the fourth law of robotics. So if you go back to-

Yes. So, yeah, well, Asimov, who was, you know, head of his time here, wrote in science fiction books that there should be laws that govern kind of the interaction between robots and humans. And he had the three laws of robotics.

And what we came up with was this idea that there needs to be a fourth law, which is that if robots are going to train on human data or learn from human data in any way, that this should be done with the permission of humans. And humans should have some control over how that works. They should get compensated for it. So that's kind of our way of like kind of philosophically bridging these two perspectives. So you're building a company, but you're also trying to build like...

a movement slash philosophy that is new and different. Yeah, that too. And also kind of like a legal framework. I mean, we kind of want to be the company that sort of like governs this dynamic between content owners and NAI companies. How interesting. Did he give you a sense of then how he plans to monetize this? This is charging a...

fee you know percentage fee to himself and then some to the authors no basically is that you know he he hasn't said that yet but i want that's why i i thought it was really interesting uh there's this tech uh writer called ashley vance he wrote the very first book about elon musk a long time ago and he's written uh another book and he's he's very well known and he posted something on x this week which was terms and conditions of a contract he had been offered

He doesn't say by who. It could be by these guys. But it says it's with HarperCollins. One of his publishers has negotiated a unique opportunity with a tech company that compensates our authors for the right to use existing titles to train, fine tune and test AI models. And basically the bottom line is if you want to hand over your book for three years, the author will receive a per title fee of $2,500 per book.

And he put this out on Twitter being like, hey, or sorry, X, being like, hey, what do people think of this? And, you know, it was all over the place of like, this is insulting. This is terrible or might as well. Otherwise, it's going to be zero. But, you know, as somebody who is writing a book.

You know, you know how much blood, sweat and tears goes into it. And then at the end, you're like, okay, I will. Here's your 2000 quid check. For three years. Yeah. It's fascinating to see a number put on it, isn't it? Yeah. Because we talk about this a lot, but actually it's quite hard to see some of the commercial terms. I think the fundamental question he raised, which is really interesting, is like, what's the value of human created data in an AI world?

And I think that's the rubber hitting that road like now and over this next year in particular. It's going to be really interesting. Fascinating. And when you come back to the political influence and you see who's on the stage with Trump and the tech trillionaires and you look at their views around this, I mean, I know Satya Nadella wasn't there, but he made it very clear in his interview that he did with us a few months ago.

Where he stood on the copyright issue. This is not like, shouldn't be shocking to anybody that the tech companies are like, yeah, yeah, no, we can just use everything we want and pay nothing or as little as possible. We're advancing technology. Yeah. For all of you. For the good of society in the medieval court. But anyway, so that's it. Yeah. So I thought, I think it's a really interesting idea and they just, um,

Created by humans. They just raised, I think, 11 million bucks, including from giant ventures out in the UK and a few other kind of prominent VCs. So they've got the money. They've launched and we'll see how it goes. But I think it's one to watch to see how well or not they do. They've got the money, unlike maybe Stargate. There's a few billion between them. Yeah.

Yeah. Do get in touch with us if you've got any comments about the show or any suggestions of interviews or anything like that. Yes, please do. Our email address is again techpod at thetimes.co.uk. Well, yeah, feel better and hopefully to see you at full power next week. Yes, I'll be powered up next week. The penicillin is a wonderful invention. Technology, eh? Exactly. It's not all bad. This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by Vanta.

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