The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (“ALCS”) has launched a survey for its members on two potential licensing options for the use of their works in Artificial Intelligence systems. It comes against the backdrop of concern among writers that their copyright-protected works are used to develop generative AI systems: earlier this year, 97% of those members of the Society of Authors who were polled said that they did not consent to their works being used to develop these systems without their permission, credit, or remuneration.

The first licensing model on which the ALCS seeks views is what is termed the ‘Prompt Licence’. In essence, this would be a licence permitting content from written works to be used as prompts in AI systems. The ALCS provides the example of an organisation obtaining a prompt licence so as to enable them to input a copy of a chapter from a book into an AI system and ask it to summarise all of the key points. The work would only be used for this purpose, and critically would not be used to train the AI system itself.

An alternative licensing model would be available where works would be used to train the AI system: the so-called ‘Training Licence’. As the name suggests, a training licence would allow an AI developer to use the copyright-protected work to train the AI system.

The ALCS makes clear that it is too early to predict the ‘achievable scale’ of licence fees, but that it will share more details on this in due course.

In the meantime, the survey can be found here.