I edited this rather spineless bit of commentary. Typical of writers with marshmellow spines. He could have chosen not to sign Black Inc’s pact with the devil.

Black Inc has asked consent from its authors to train AI models on their work and then share the revenue with those authors.

I have published four books with Black Inc, have a fifth coming out next month, and have a contract for a sixth by the end of the year. And I have also been an AI researcher for 40 years, training AI models with data.

No one starts a new publisher to make big money. Indeed, many small publishers are struggling to survive in a market dominated by the Big Five. For example, Penguin Random House – the world’s largest general book publisher – recently acquired one of Australia’s leading independent publishers, the Text Publishing Company.

Most books lose money. They publish many works that are worthy but are unlikely to make a profit.

Publishers make a return with the occasional bestseller. Small publishers like Black Inc nurture new Australian authors.

I am outraged at the tech companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta for training their AI models on my copyrighted books without either my consent or offering me or Black Inc any compensation.

Last year, at the Sydney Writers’ festival, I called it the greatest heist in human history. All of human culture is being ingested into these AI models for the profit of a few technology companies.

Publishing needs to go in a similar direction as streaming. And for that to happen, small publishers especially need a strong position to negotiate with the mighty tech companies. I therefore signed Black Inc’s contract. It is, in my view, the lesser of the two evils.

It is outrageous that the technology companies argue that AI models being trained on books is no different from humans reading a copyrighted book. It’s not. It’s a different scale.

The AI models are trained on more books than a human could read in a lifetime of reading. And, as the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI argues, it’s taking business away from publishers that is keeping them alive.

Imagine a future where these large AI models ingest all of our digital knowledge. Not just books. All of science. All of our cultural knowledge. All of personal knowledge.

A large tech company that will know more about us and the world than a human could possibly comprehend. Imagine also that these companies use all this information to manipulate what we do and what we buy in ways that we couldn’t begin to understand.

Toby Walsh is professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney