“All these investments easily exceed, what, £60,000? And then a manuscript keeps 20 more people busy: agents, editors, production, printers, sales reps, booksellers, critics, all of whom pay into pension funds and pay taxes. An author, to quote Margaret Atwood, is like a dead moose: numerous other life forms still live off them.
And then some tech dude comes along and claims that books have no economic value, certainly not for his large language model, which generates billions in revenue worldwide. You wonder what went wrong, first in his education and second in his upbringing, to make him steal from other people and then claim that it’s worthless anyway. (When it comes to future licence negotiations, let’s go with the £60k per book: that’ll be fun.) Even more, you wonder how political decision-makers
fall for this poppycock about ‘win/win’.“

Excerpt from Nina George’s essay Noted: “Moving – timing – fighting – Sex” for the Members’ Journal of The Society of Authors (UK) association.
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