Earlier this month, Daniel Kibblesmith received an emailed memo from HarperCollins, one of the world’s largest publishing companies, offering $2,500 to license his 2017 children’s book Santa’s Husband over a three-year period. The catch? The title would be licensed to a tech company to help train an A.I. model. “Abominable,” the author wrote of the offer in a post on the microblogging site Bluesky.

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With their troves of high-quality content, book publishers have emerged as an enticing target for A.I. companies in need of data to enhance the capabilities and knowledge of their A.I. systems. HarperCollins, a British-American publishing company and member of the “Big Five” publishing group, recently inked a partnership with Microsoft that will see some of its nonfiction books used to help the company train a new model, as reported by........

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