A brief Womancraft statement on AI

Like many of you we have been watching the extremely fast rollout of AI with complex and nuanced feelings.

As creators and intellectual property holders, as a business founded on nurturing, supporting and midwifing the creative work of women, I feel it is important to make our position clear on the use of AI as it currently stands.

We, like tens of thousands of other authors and publishers, have discovered many of our books have been used without permission or payment to train the current iterations of AI.

This is, in our minds, clearly theft. If you or I were to walk into a bookshop and to walk out with a whole bundle of books without paying, everyone would understand this as property theft. What AI is doing, is more than this: it is intellectual property theft, they are not just taking our words for personal use but our words and ideas have been taken without payment, by hugely wealthy multinational corporations, and are being re-woven into new material, constantly, without acknowledgment.

As a small independent publisher, founded to treat women authors and artists fairly, this is not okay with us. Therefore, as it currently stands, we will not be using AI generated images or writing in our books.

1. We look forward to receiving compensation for our intellectual property rights, from the AI companies who have stolen it and are following US class action lawsuits on this matter with interest, and are considering our own course of action here.
2. We are putting clear statements on the copyright pages of all of our books making clear that they are not for use by AI.
3. We look forward to seeing future iterations of AI, which have been produced fairly. That are powerful tools which humans can work alongside, that do not infringe on the rights of human creatives.

We have always been a company that is hugely reliant on technological innovation. From print-on-demand to Zoom calls to the internet and cloud storage. From word processors and spell-checkers to graphic design tools. We could not do what we do without the tools that technology has given us. But, we stand firmly, in the belief that these must be developed ethically.