There’s been a lot of talk about the Spotify/Findaway Voices Rights Grab, and Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware wrote an excellent article breaking down the terms both before and after their “reversal” here. However, I’m seeing a lot of authors in groups talk about this as a “win”, and even Writer Beware states that while the terms are better than they were, they still aren’t perfect. What I’m hearing no one speak about is that this isn’t isolated.
As an author technologist, I want to unpack what “corporate training and development” really means for you, the author and rights holder.
Just recently Reddit announced a deal with Google’s AI to use Reddit content to “train” the AI. I hope we all know that your likes/shares/comments all go toward corporate-owned social media (Meta, X, etc.) training it’s algorithm and AI tools. I’ve seen a flurry of TOS changes hit my inbox for many different programs I use from a calendar scheduling and time tracking app to CRMs, and nearly all of them talk about using data for “corporate training and development”.
What does training and development mean?
The truth is, we don’t know. From a technology standpoint, it often means fixing bugs in the code, developing new features, creating new products and programs they want to deploy, but understandably most big companies are notoriously closed-lipped about it.
We also don’t know how many people your data is exposed to. Generally the data of the largest users would be used to populate a development or testing version of the software. This
