A coalition of American novelists and authors is banding together to safeguard their intellectual property and prevent AI companies from pilfering their works to train language models, thereby preserving the copyright and integrity of their creative output.
“Authors must come together now and negotiate with AI companies as a block,” said novelist Doug Preston in an interview with Fortune.com.
Preston says he has published at least 40 books, all of which he has discovered have been used by AI firms to train their models without his consent.
Violation
This violation of his copyright led him to believe that authors and AI developers need some sort of licensing system that protects both parties from copyright infringement.
That’s where the startup Created by Humans (CbH) comes in.
Created by Humans was launched in June 2024 and acts as a licensing service for authors. It is a licensing bridge between authors and AI developers.
“Authors can sign up, claim their works, and note the licenses they’d like to grant to AI developers,” said Jen Singerman, co-founder and COO of Created by Humans.
Why this matters
Creators of all kinds are increasingly frustrated with how their work is being used by AI firms without their permission.
According to CbH, over 100 authors have signed up to the service (as of January 2025).
The Authors Guild, a professional group representing over 15,000 authors, including its former president Preston, has partnered with Created by Humans since October 2024.
“We urgently need to give control back to authors and their publishers, and licensing is the means to accomplish that going forward,” said Mary Rasenberger, Authors Guild’s CEO.
Money for work
Preston notes that AI licensing could be a lucrative opportunity for authors, as AI companies rely on books to train their large language models, and require repeated ingestion of new texts with each model iteration.
The CEO of Created by Humans, Trip Adler, claims CbH is currently AI licensing a book every five minutes.
Industry pricing models
The big question is, how much can authors charge AI companies when licensing their work? There are four pricing models currently in place.
Flat fee – A one-time payment for access to an author’s catalog (e.g., $50,000 – $500,000+ depending on content volume and uniqueness).
Per-word rate – AI firms sometimes pay per million words (e.g., $1,000 – $10,000 per million words, based on exclusivity and quality).
Revenue share – Authors receive a percentage of the revenue AI firms generate using their content.
Tiered pricing – Authors charge different rates based on usage (e.g., research vs. commercial use).
In November 2024, the Authors Guild disclosed that HarperCollins, a leading publisher under NewsCorp, had entered into an agreement with Microsoft, allowing the tech giant to use select HarperCollins nonfiction titles to train its AI models. The deal priced each title at $5,000 for a three-year period of training rights.
Fundraising
Created by Humans has raised a total of $11 million in funding, including a $5.5 million seed round led by Giant Ventures.
Investors include
- Slack co-founder Cal Henderson
- Emmett Shear, co-founder of Twitch and interim CEO of OpenAI
- Kyle Vogt, co-founder of Cruise Automation
- Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston
- Cameron Yarbrough, Torch’s co-founder.
- Uncommon Capital
- The pre-seed round, led by Floodgate and Craft Ventures, collected $5.5 million in June, 2024.
Pictured are Created by Humans founders Jen Singerman (left), Trip Adler (centre), and Edward Igushev (right).
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