John Carlos Baez𝗤𝗨𝗜𝗖𝗞! 𝗙𝗘𝗘𝗗 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗕𝗘𝗔𝗦𝗧!
Academic publisher Taylor & Francis recently sold many of its authors’ works to Microsoft for $10 million, without asking or paying the authors — to train Microsoft’s large language models!
Taylor & Francis asked their journal "Learning, Media and Technology" to cut peer review time to 15 days — absurdly little time — to crank out more content.
And Taylor & Francis's subsidiary Routledge told staff that it was “extra important” to meet publishing targets for 2024. It moved some book deadlines from 2025 to 2024. Why? To meet its deadline with Microsoft.
Another academic publisher, Wiley, made a $44 million deal to feed academic books to LLMs — with no way for authors to opt out. They say “it is in the public interest for these emerging technologies to be trained on high-quality, reliable information.”
When you publish with one of the big academic publishers, they try to make you sign a contract saying they can do whatever they want with your work. That means anything.
Hat-tip to @bstacey for pointing this out.
These articles have links to original sources:
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/08/04/more-academic-publishers-are-doing-ai-deals/
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