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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
“Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right”: Meta emails unsealed
In the initial news-breaking and opinion-slinging around Meta’s LLM training data, not much consideration was given to where the book data it was using came from. Mostly because neither of the two camps’ argument (using books at all is theft v. this is how things go in technology) really care if they were using legally acquired books. But the law, it turns out, might care. If you can prove that the books in the data set were both pirated and seeded (aka provided for other people to pirate), that might poison the well. It doesn’t answer the more philosophical questions about training LLMs on human output without consent and compensation (outside presumably at least buying like an ebook of each title in the data set), but it could prove extremely costly in this legal dispute. My own open question “is this all that different than a person reading a bunch of books and then writing an amalgam/homage/remix/?” does in fact assume that the books under consideration were obtained legally.
NEA cancels Challenge America grant and changes its guidelines and deadlines
The Challenge America opportunity that was available through the NEA as recently as last week is no longer being offered. I know you will be surprised to hear that the Challenge America opportunity was designed to serve underrepresented communities and artists. Fear not, because while it has gone away, a new call for patriotic celebration of the sesquicentennial is now on the NEA website. I cannot imagine a way to subsidize the most boring stuff imaginable.
Readers’ Day: Never Let Me Go
So here’s the deal, for 75 pounds (this is in London), you can spend the day in a cool bookish place with 15 other book lovers discussing, exploring, close-reading, and otherwise engaging with Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, lead by a leading scholar and former judge for the Booker Prize. This is an awesome idea and a bargain. I want to both attend one of these and host one. Is this a bad idea? Even if it is 3x worse of an idea than what Faber is doing, it is might still be a pretty good idea. That’s how good of an idea this is.
I talked to Professor Shigehiro Oishi about his new book, Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life.
Books and reading play a central role in the book, both as examples but also as avenues towards living a psychologically rich life. I really enjoyed this book and this conversation.