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"Currently, Tsinghua University, Peking University and China University of Political Science and Law have all proposed drafts related to AIGC."

Text｜"Chinese Entrepreneurs" reporter Tao Tao

Editor: Yao Yun

Image source: Visual China

On July 20, Qiu Yan, who had just terminated the AI ​​training contract with Fanqie Novel, suddenly found that his traffic on the platform continued to decline, from two or three hundred yuan a day to a few dozen yuan.

In May this year, Qiu Yan signed a contract with Tomato Novel and became an online writer. "Out of trust in the platform and lack of legal knowledge, I did not carefully study the terms of the contract and signed the contract directly with the platform," Qiu Yan said. On July 16, she learned from a post by a netizen that the terms she signed included AI training authorization.

Screenshot of AI clauses. Source: Interviewee

The core clause involved in the dispute is 3.2.10, and there are two main issues:Party A may use all/part of the contents of the contracted work and related information for data, corpus, text, material annotation and learning; Party B agrees to disseminate the text generated by Party A after model training and shall not sue Party A for infringement.

"I am very worried that the copyright of my work will not be protected in the case of AI training corpus." Qiu Yan told China Entrepreneur. So, after communicating with Tomato Novel, the author terminated the AI ​​authorization agreement. But after that, she felt that she was restricted. Qiu Yan showed her background data. The comprehensive value on July 15 was 325, and on July 17 it dropped to around 60, which was non-normal distribution compared with the previous one.

Qiu Yan is not an isolated case, and the controversial Tomato Novel is not an isolated example of AI layout.

As early as July last year, China Literature Group launched the industry's first large model "China Literature Magic Pen" and the writer assistant Magic Pen version; in June last year, iReader Technology launched the "Yue Ai Liao" applet, the first conversational AI application in the domestic reading industry for C-end users; for Zhihu, where paid reading has become a basic market, in November last year, it also launched the Chinese large model "Zhi Hai Tu AI" with Mianbi Intelligence, one of the "New Four AI Dragons". iReader Technology CTO Sun Kai believes that how to truly stimulate users' interest in reading is the core of changing the essence of reading, and the integration of generative AI and reading will achieve a deeper level of interaction with users.

The difference is that in the past, AI applications were mostly focused on the user side, such as reading experience and translation, while the controversy over Tomato Novel is now focused on the "supply side". Similar to the copyright disputes caused by AI drawings and AI videos in the past, this trend has finally spread to the field of online novels. Online writers are worried thatAs the large model training matures, its role may change from an auxiliary tool for writing to the main force. If AI steals your content without authorization, it may one day be abandoned.

“Before the relevant legislation on AIGC copyright issues is clear, the concerns of these authors are reasonable. However, the government is promoting legislation on how to deal with AI infringement issues in depth.Currently, Tsinghua University, Peking University and China University of Political Science and Law have all proposed drafts related to AIGC."Liu Wei, director of the Human-Computer Interaction and Cognitive Engineering Laboratory at the School of Artificial Intelligence of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and visiting scholar at Cambridge University, told China Entrepreneur.

Fang Zinan, a lawyer at Global Business Network, also gave an analysis from another perspective: "AI has always been an important technology that has played an important role in promoting the development of productivity. In the process of improving relevant laws, regulations and adjudication rules, we must pay attention to encouraging and protecting the industry to avoid the situation where 'legislation goes too far ahead and the industry goes too far behind', and a group of people are waiting to cut the cake before it is ready."

Hidden Terms

In June, the AI ​​agreement incident of Tomato Novel began to ferment gradually. At first, some old authors on the platform found that they had received AI supplementary agreements. Then, these authors protested on social platforms and stopped updating their works. In mid-July, Qiu Yan noticed the AI ​​"hidden" clause in his contract through the posts of some vocal authors. "If I hadn't checked the social platform, I wouldn't have found it." said a newly signed author.

On July 16, in response to the above controversy, the online writing platform responded to the AI ​​training issue on the forum "Dragon's Sky" and the official account of Tomato Novel on Toutiao: "The official has not released any works written purely by AI, and will not use AI writing capabilities against the author's personal wishes. If the author has any objections to the agreement, we can help to terminate the relevant AI terms as soon as possible."

In this regard, several authors stated thatTomato Novel's regular channels for sending messages to authors are all internal messages.. "Dragon's Sky" is only a forum for online writers to communicate. Writers will not pay attention to new posts on the forum all day long; even new writers may not know the existence of the forum. In the eyes of the authors, publishing information on Toutiao is just an explanation to the outside world, not a direct information channel to the authors.

"We hope that as little news or posts about this matter as possible will be paid attention to, and the number of authors who take the initiative to terminate their contracts will be reduced as much as possible."Some authors mentioned this. In addition, many authors said that this response was evasive and played word games: "Not publishing works written by 'pure AI' means that most of the content may have been published by AI, such as real people building the framework and AI filling in the content."

Upon inquiry,There are currently multiple accounts on Tomato Novel that update more than a dozen books a day. For example, an author with the ID "Jiang Yuan Storytelling" has put 3 books on the shelves in the past six months, and 222 books in the past three months.The frequency of updates is so fast that it is beyond the reach of normal human efforts.

In addition, many authors revealed that a few days ago, the number of works under this account had reached 266. After some authors found that many of the works on the shelves had only different titles and pen names, but the beginning was the same, the account has currently deleted more than 40 works.

Source: Tomato Novel APP

"China Entrepreneur" asked Tomato Novel about the author's doubts, but the author declined to comment.

Before the AI ​​agreement was terminated, Qiu Yan's daily income was about 5-6 yuan. After the agreement was terminated, her daily income shrank to a few cents due to the decline in traffic. "But on July 20, I received a message from the station telling me that my traffic was restricted recently due to the recent discontinuation of content.Therefore, I cannot guarantee that my personal flow limit is directly related to the termination of the contract."She added. But the four-day time difference between the 20th and the 16th made Qiu Yan feel that the flow control was not as simple as "breaking the update".

On July 22, in response to the issue of being restricted for not signing the AI ​​supplementary agreement, the relevant person in charge of the platform replied to "China Entrepreneur": "Tomato Novel will restrict, remove, and block works that violate the platform's governance rules (such as infringement, vulgarity, pornography, etc.). Tomato has recently dealt with some works that violated the platform's governance regulations, which has nothing to do with the relevant supplementary agreement."

It is understood that on multiple social platforms, there areHundreds of bloggers posted that they were restricted after terminating their contract with Tomato Novel, and that they had not received any information about any violations.An author told China Entrepreneurs:His termination application was submitted on the 16th, but is still pending.

After this incident, many authors said that they could no longer trust Tomato Novel and were preparing to switch to other suitable websites.

Online literature platforms have been planning AI for a long time

Before the AI ​​clauses of Tomato Novel came into effect, many companies including ByteDance, Tencent, and Zhihu were investing in large models with Chinese writing as their core or main capability.

In August 2023, ByteDance's first GPT-type application, Doubao, was launched, providing chat dialogue, question and answer, writing assistance, copywriting generation, translation, image generation and other services. As of May 15, 2024, the total download volume of Doubao APP exceeded 100 million, and the monthly active users on both ends exceeded 26 million.

It is worth noting thatBefore the Tomato Novel AI protocol was launched, Doubao's corpus was suspected to have been fed with free and paid literary works from all over the Internet.For example, an author of a novel called Tomato mentioned that when searching for his novels outside the site on Doubao, which are novels listed on Qidian, he could also find relevant content. The author suspected that his real-name registration information on Tomato Novel had been leaked, and that all the content written under his different online names on major platforms had been captured.

Source: Screenshot from Xiaohongshu

Last July, Tencent's online literature platform Yuewen also released the first large model in the domestic online literature industry, Yuewen Miaobi, and the application product "Writer Assistant Miaobi Edition" based on this large model. This product directly enters the writer's creative process from the aspects of content inspiration, scene creation, knowledge services, etc. The Writer Assistant Miaobi Edition has been opened to all Yuewen contracted writers, and the weekly usage rate of AI functions has reached 30%.

However, when China Entrepreneur asked the relevant person in charge of China Literature about the source of the materials in the large model "China Literature Magic Pen", the other party declined to comment.

In addition, in 2023, 21 of the top 100 works on the best-selling list of WebNovel (Qidian International), a website under China Literature, were translated by AI. China Literature CEO Hou Xiaonan previously said,We hope to use AI machine translation to reduce translation costs to 1% of manual translation costs. In the future, China Literature’s goal is to enable online literature to be “generated with one click” for overseas publications.

As for Zhihu, in 2022, it participated in the angel round of financing of AI startup Mianbi Intelligence as the lead investor. After that, in November 2023, it jointly released the Chinese model of "Zhihaitu AI" with Mianbi Intelligence.

Before 2019, online literature had experienced about 15 years of market development, and the payment barriers that had gradually been built up were broken by the "advertising + free" model of "invaders" such as Baidu's Qimao and ByteDance's Tomato Novels. With more players and the peak of Internet traffic, online literature platforms have to seek new growth points.

The waters of the online literature market, which had just calmed down, were stirred up again. Since last year, in addition to the layout of short dramas by many online literature platforms to further expand the value of IP, AIGC has become a new tool.

For platforms such as Zhihu, Yuewen and Fanqie Novels, the addition of large models can become a new growth engine for old players in the online literature track and explore the possibility of profitability for those who are losing money.

In 2023, the annual revenue of China Literature Group decreased by 8% compared with 2022. Among them, paid reading decreased by 9.5% year-on-year and copyright operation decreased by 5.9%. In addition to the main business, a new growth curve is urgently needed.

Zhihu's operating conditions are even more severe. Although paid reading of Zhihu novels has gradually become the mainstay of its performance, accounting for 46.8% in 2023; but in the past five years, its losses have still reached 5.2 billion yuan.

Will big models replace online writers?

The role of AI in improving the productivity of online literature is obvious - this is a consensus among online literature platforms and many online writers.

Douban contracted author Chuxi told "China Entrepreneur" that he would use ChatGPT to draft his novels recently; Qiu Yan also revealed that she would use AI to assist her in writing, such as searching and generating some names, place names, weapons, and elixir names, or some sentence descriptions as references; Liu Wei has been writing the science fiction romance novel "Sword and Bridge" for the past year, and he has also used ChatGPT from time to time.

Although AI is of great help to online writing, online writers have more concerns about AI.

Qiu Yan is worried about the copyright of online articles. "Is AI plagiarism considered plagiarism? How can authors protect their rights if AI plagiarizes them?"It is so difficult and time-consuming for real-life authors to protect their rights, so if the opponent is AI, how can the author protect his or her hard work?”

In this regard, China has also issued interim measures in the field of AI. On August 15, 2023, my country officially implemented the "Interim Measures for the Management of Generative Artificial Intelligence Services", which clearly stipulates that AIGC service providers should carry out training data processing activities such as pre-training and optimization training in accordance with the law, and use data and basic models with legal sources; if intellectual property rights are involved, they shall not infringe on the intellectual property rights enjoyed by others in accordance with the law.

However, Fang Zinan explained the interim measures: “We believe that, considering the overall operational process of AI training, under the current legal framework, simply feeding existing works, fragments, or materials into the model (no content has been output at this stage) does not constitute use that can be evaluated under the Copyright Law (even if it is considered to be a copying behavior, it cannot be discovered if it is not output).”

“However, at the output stage, the specific judgment should be made based on whether the content is substantially similar to the original work. Therefore, we believe thatThe control of AI training should focus on the output stage rather than the training stage. This will help promote the development of the AI ​​industry and, to a certain extent, safeguard the interests of human authors.”

This leads to the second question: Even if there are certain restrictions on the output of the big model now, once it has been trained with massive amounts of corpus, what should the author do if the big model is “opened” again one day?

"There are only a few authors who can achieve financial freedom by buying cars and houses with their novels. Most authors, like me, are struggling to get perfect attendance. AI has strong learning ability and generates text quickly. Ordinary authors cannot compare with it at all. Who can guarantee that they will not be replaced?" an author posted.

There are also technological optimists.

"I don't have a sense of crisis. It would be great if it could implement my ideas, saving me the typing." said New Year's Eve.

Liu Wei believes that AI is still a long way from surpassing humans, and there is no need to worry too much from the perspective of technological development: "The Sword and the Bridge is a work that combines rationality and sensibility. The content written by AI lacks the atmosphere I want because it does not have human experience and common sense."

Just like Midjourney to painters, Suno to music creators, and Sora to video editing, AIGC will definitely bring impact to many industries, but they cannot replace Van Gogh, Jay Chou, and Nolan. "In this case, in addition to the role of the industry itself, the role of government governance and regulation is also crucial," said Liu Wei.

Qiuyan and Chuxien are pseudonyms in this article.