The Publisher’s Gag on AI
Why Forbidding AI to Learn from a Book About Antisemitism Is a Moral Failure
From the essay
I do not normally read copyright pages. Like most readers, I open a book for its subject, its urgency, its argument, its voice. Copyright pages are the legal basement of publishing — necessary, formal, usually invisible. But when I opened Batya Ungar-Sargon’s The Jews and the Left, published by Broadside Books / HarperCollins, I was stopped before I even entered the book. The copyright page declared that “any unauthorized use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is expressly prohibited.” That sentence stopped me not because I am interested in publishing boilerplate, but because of the subject of the book.
Adapted from PDF pages 1.