When you sign up for the Created by Humans (CBH) platform, you will sign a Creator License Agreement (“CLA”). The CLA sets out the terms and conditions for your use of the platform. You should read it and familiarize yourself with the terms. This FAQ summarizes and attempts to distill some of the terms but not all of them. If you are an Authors Guild member, you may reach out to us with questions about the CLA and the CBH Platform generally by submitting a legal request at support@createdbyhumans.ai.

All of the capitalized terms used in this FAQ are defined in the CLA.

We will update these FAQs from time to time as questions are presented to us.

1. What is Created by Humans?

Created by Humans is a platform that enables authors to license their works to AI developers, and enables authors to control, manage, and monetize their books and articles while giving AI developers access to high-quality, curated written works with the full consent of rights holders. 

2. What is the Authors Guild’s relationship with Created by Humans?

The Authors Guild has a non-exclusive partnership with Created by Humans to facilitate author enrollment on the platform. Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, joined as an advisory board member of the company to provide guidance to CbH on author’s interests and help ensure that the platform protects them. The Guild is advising CBH on the development of the platform with the goal of centering authors in the licensing chain and protecting their rights. The Guild and CBH are also collaborating to produce educational resources for authors to use and get the most out of the platform. The Guild will receive 1% of the fees of authors it brings in to cover its costs for the program. It does not otherwise receive any financial benefit from the partnership.

3. How do I sign up for the Created by Humans platform?

The platform is intuitive and user-friendly with clear explanations and videos embedded at every stage of the process, but here is a brief overview:

First, authors must create an account at www.createdbyhumans.ai, which involves verifying their identity. Then they can claim the books they want to make available for licensing by ISBN (the platform will already contain this data) or by uploading the work to the platform. (Note that if the author does not have a final copy of the text, you may want to ask your publisher to supply one or to allow a third party such as Ingram to do so.)

After that, authors will be able to select the types of licenses they’re willing to offer. Currently, the platform supports two types of licenses—1) training and 2) reference (see Q. 8-10 below). New types of licenses may be added in the future. 

Authors then select any restrictions they want on the licenses (such as restrictions on verbatim text, summary uses, etc.). This completes the process of offering works for the author, and, if there are no other rightsholders in the work, makes the selected works available to AI companies for potential license. No license is executed at this point. If there are multiple rightsholders (see Q. 12-13 below), all of them must select the same types of licenses and provide an agreed allocation amongst them before CbH offers the work for a license in its marketplace. 

Making the works available allows CBH to negotiate the licenses. Once the works are made available in the marketplace, CBH works with AI developers and negotiates the license in line with the licensing rights set and granted by the rightsholder(s). If a potential deal is made, the rightsholder(s) receive a Potential Deal Notice with a 7-day deadline to decline the deal; if no rightsholder declines the deal, the license becomes active. Unless there is a publisher, co-author, or other rights holder involved, the author receives all of the income from licenses, net of CBH’s 20% fee. In the questions below we discuss the process in greater detail, including scenarios where other rightsholders are involved.

4. What kind of restrictions can I place as part of the license?

Created by Humans aims to put full control in the hands of rightsholders. The restrictions allow you to determine how you do and don’t want your works to be used by an AI licensee, including whether or not you allow verbatim text quotations or summaries in outputs, among other uses. The restrictions you set will dictate what licenses CbH may grant. 

For example, if you do not allow for limited verbatim text quotations from your work, the AI licensee will be obligated to implement safeguards to prevent its users from generating verbatim text from that work through the CbH license.

Additionally, you (and each rightsholder in your work) have 7 days to review the particular uses and restrictions for each potential license and the option to decline any deal that CbH sources on your behalf if you are not satisfied with it for any reason. 

5. How will I know about potential deals, and how can I choose not to participate?

Once the works are made available, CBH finds AI developers and negotiates licenses in accordance with the authors’ preferences. If a potential deal is made, every author who selected rights covered by that potential license will receive a Potential Deal Notice with a 7-day deadline to decline the deal; if the author does not decline the deal, their selected works will be included in the license.

The Potential Deal Notice will include the rights to be licensed, the licensee’s name, the licensing restrictions imposed on the AI company, and the approximate fees (approximate because fees will vary depending on the number of opt-outs).

6. What rights will I be granting CBH if I use their platform?

When you sign up for the CBH platform, you will sign the Creator License Agreement (CLA). In that agreement, you grant CBH permission to use your work as necessary to operate the platform and to license out the rights you select on the CBH platform to AI companies.  The rights you to CBH grant are non-exclusive (meaning you keep your rights too and can license them on a non-exclusive basis through another platform or to an AI company), limited to specific purposes, subject to restrictions and limitations in the agreement (referred to as Licensing Restrictions), and only applicable to the works you specifically authorize CBH to license. To be clear, you can select different “Available AI Rights” for different works.  You may, for instance, have different licensing preferences for new and older works or for fiction vs. nonfiction works.

7. Can I set the price for my license? What if I don’t like the terms of the deal CBH has negotiated?

Since the license is negotiated between CBH and AI companies, authors cannot set their own compensation. However, if an author believes that a potential deal is not in their interest, they can decline it. As we explain above, authors will receive a “Potential Deal Notice” – a notification of a potential deal spelling out certain deal terms—and will have seven days to decline the deal. Note, however, that you need to first select what “Available AI Rights” you are willing to license for each work, or they will not be included in any potential deals, and you will not receive “Potential Deal Notices” for them. Also, note that selecting Available AI Rights does not in and of itself create any license to any AI Licensee.

8. What are the rights granted to an AI company under the CBH licenses?

Currently, the CBH licenses grant AI companies two main types of rights to use creative works:

  1. Training Rights
  2. Reference Rights

Together, these are referred to as “AI Rights” in the CLA. They are the rights that CBH can license to allow AI companies to use specific works that creators have chosen to make available, but only for the uses the author selected. Importantly, creators maintain control—they can choose which of their works can be used, exactly what rights they want to grant for each work, and the restrictions they want before any licensing occurs.

Specifically, the rights granted include rights to “host, store, copy, transmit, analyze, index, categorize, reproduce, distribute, display, perform and/or exhibit” the works, and limited rights to “translate, adapt, modify or make derivative works.” Authors do not directly grant these rights to the AI licensee but grant them to CBH, who in turn negotiates and executes an outbound licensee agreement with AI companies. All rights are granted subject to restrictions authors select on the platform, are non-exclusive, and are limited to the specific purpose of training and/or reference uses.

9. What are Training Rights?

Training involves the process whereby an AI model recognizes patterns from large amounts of data and develops probabilistic models based on those patterns that allow the AI system to respond to user queries. This training can either develop a completely new AI model or improve an existing one through a process called “fine-tuning.”

Training Rights are defined in the CLA as “rights for an AI Licensee to convert licensed Selected Works to tokenized datasets and use those datasets for purposes of creating one or more Trained Models to generate permitted Output.”

In plainer language, training rights are rights you give to CBH to license out to AI developers to tokenize the work into a learning dataset and run algorithms on it to develop an AI model. The model contains information obtained from the dataset.

10. What are Reference Rights?

Referencing, on the other hand, is more like giving the AI access to a library that it can look up information in whenever it needs to answer a question – the AI doesn’t is not “trained” on the content, but it can check it when needed. Referencing, for instance, can be used to amplify and check accuracy of the AI’s response.

Reference Rights are defined in the CLA as “rights for an AI Licensee to use licensed Selected Works in Grounding Tools for purposes of creating one or more Grounded Models to generate permitted Output that may incorporate portions of such Selected Works, depending on the AI Right(s) licensed.”

In simpler terms, a reference license gives the AI company the right to access an external dataset containing the works to reference—or check—information in real-time while the AI system processes a response to the user query.

11. What rights does CBH have to use my name?

CBH has permission to use your name and related information in specific ways, with different levels of permission required. For standard platform operations, CBH can display your name and work titles, use information from your public profile (such as your username, social media handles, website, location, and profile photos), and include this information in attributions required by the agreement as well as in internal marketing materials and organic social media – all without seeking additional permission. However, CBH must obtain your express approval before using your name or information in promotional or publicity materials, public marketing materials, or in any way that could be seen as your endorsement of CBH or the platform. Additionally, due to the nature of AI licensing, you’ll need to waive certain “moral rights” (rights related to attribution and work integrity) to enable the platform to function. This means your work may be combined with other materials when used for AI training, information about your work may be modified or removed in certain circumstances, and attribution may not always be possible in AI outputs. (See CLA sections 2.2 and 2.3.)

12. Do I need my publishers’ permission to enroll the works on the platform and enter into licenses?

That depends on whether your publisher owns the AI Rights that you sign up for, which is dictated by your contract. CBH will not license out AI Rights to a work for AI use unless all rightsholders to the work agree to license those rights.

Training Rights

If your contract provides exclusive rights to the publisher to license out your work for uses that cover AI training, they are a legal rightsholder, and the publisher must enroll your work on the platform. That is also true if you assigned the entire copyright in the work, as is sometimes true for academic presses.

Most trade contracts, however, do not grant the publishers AI training rights but the author retains them, as we previously have explained in AI Licensing for Authors: Who Owns the Rights and what’s a Fair Split. Nevertheless, some publishers claim rights to license out for AI training even though there is no clear grant of rights for such use, arguing that it falls under a general right to license out for “other” (not already specified in the agreement) digital or electronic uses (generally with the author’s consultation or consent). After reviewing many trade contracts from recent years, the Authors Guild disagrees with that analysis, and yet it is possible some trade contracts do give the publisher the rights. Moreover, publishers may also insist on having a say in training licenses that do not expressly prohibit outputs that incorporate portions of the work, as they generally have exclusive rights to publication and excerpt uses. To be clear, however, CBH’s training-only licenses will not allow such reproduction. In any case, we recommend that traditionally published authors discuss the rights issues with their agents and may also want to engage their publishers.

Reference Rights

Your publisher may have a claim to the exclusive right to authorize reference licenses if they allow reproduction of portions of the published work. You should discuss this with your agent and publisher before granting CBH the rights.   

Digital File to be Uploaded

CBH requires that a complete and final copy of each Work be uploaded to the Platform. (See CLA sections 1.5 and 3.1.)  If you do not possess such a copy, you may want to obtain a digital file for the final copy of your book from or through the publisher. In such cases, you may negotiate with the publisher whether they should be registered on the platform as well and if they are entitled to receive and portion of the royalties directly from CBH.

Splits with Publisher

To be clear, CBH will not mediate disagreements over rights ownership.  It will rely on the representations of those who register the particular titles with them, and if you indicate there is another rightsholder they will not license out the work until all rightsholders have selected the rights to be licensed and agreed on a revenue split. If, on the other hand, you represent that you are the sole rightsholder then you will indemnify CBH for any claims to the contrary.

If you and your publisher (or a co-author or your agent, for that matter) agree to split the revenue received from any type of license, you can simply indicate what the split is on the platform, and CBH will pay each person the agreed percentage.

Be sure to disclose all rightsholders for each work you submit and keep this information current. While the platform provides tools to help establish and track each rightsholder’s rights and proportions, rightsholders are responsible for working together to resolve any disputes. You can see which AI rights other rightsholders have selected (and they can see yours), and if there’s an error in rightsholder designation, you can contact support@createdbyhumans.ai for assistance.

13. I have a co-author. Can I still use the CBH platform?

Yes, you can, but just like a publisher, your co-author(s) will have to sign up for the platform and authorize the same rights that you do. You should also indicate what percentage of revenue each co-author should receive.  

14. I am a self-published author. Can I use the CBH platform?

Absolutely!  It is simple for you to use.

15. I write picture books. Can I license them?

At this time, CBH only supports the licensing of texts. If you have a picture book, you can only license the text you have authored and own rights to.

16. What if my book contains images or other third-party material?

Images should be deleted from the files that CBH will license. In addition, you should delete any minor, non-material third-party text, such as epigraphs, if you believe you do not have the rights (either through a license or as fair use) to further license those excerpts for AI use.  Because CBH only allows the removal of minor, non-material third-party text in the file you upload, if your book contains more than minor, non-material third-party text, you should make sure you have a license from the third-party rightsholder that covers the use, or you should refrain from offering the book on the CBH Platform. (See CLA section 3.1.)

17. Will my works be protected from piracy? Is there any risk to uploading the works on the platform?

The text of your works will only be made available to CBH and AI Licensees who license your work. CBH is obliged to use at least industry standard practices to keep your works secure and require the same of licensees. They will never make your Works publicly available. (See CLA section 3.2.)   

18. What kind of restrictions will AI Licensees have to comply with?

CBH has a set of restrictions for all licensees that limit or otherwise apply to the manner in which the AI Licensees can exercise the AI Rights licensed to them. These vary depending on the type of license and are called Licensing Restrictions. You will be advised of the applicable Licensing Restrictions in each Potential Deal Notice, and if you are not satisfied with the restrictions, you can choose not to be part of that license by opting out within the 7-day window as explained in Q. 5.

19. What will CBH do if the AI licensee or their users violate my rights?

While CBH is not responsible for bringing legal action on your behalf for any violation of rights or breach of the licensing terms, and cannot do so as they are not an exclusive rights holder, they will commit to making commercially reasonable efforts to notify you if it becomes aware that an AI Licensee has breached Licensing Restrictions and will take appropriate steps to respond to breaches and violations, including by terminating the license. (See CLA section 6.)  

20. If I have made a work available for licensing, can I later remove it?

Yes, you can remove any or all works at any time. You can also terminate your agreement with CBH anytime upon notice to CBH. Once your work is included in a license, however, it cannot be removed from the license for the duration of its term (but will be removed from renewals and any new licenses). (See CLA section 9.1.)

21. What is the duration of licenses to AI companies?

The terms of each license may vary. In some cases, for instance for training uses, the license may be for a perpetual (term of copyright) duration. Other licenses, such as for reference uses, will be renewed. If you grant a license and later terminate your relationship with CBH (or remove your works from future offerings), your work will not be licensed again, but you will continue to receive royalties from any existing licenses, which will continue until expiration.

22. Can I take my works out of a licensed dataset?

You cannot take your works out of a license once the license is executed for the duration of the license. (See CLA section 9.4.)

23. What will earn from licensing?

The price of each license will be negotiated individually, so we cannot provide a number. For comparison, a recent training licensing deal provides several thousand dollars per title but others have received less. While we cannot guarantee any particular amount, since this is a new and evolving market, you have the ability to turn down any deal you do not think pays enough.  

If you’re the sole rightsholder of a work you receive all of the royalties from any licenses for that work. If you share rights with others, the royalties will be split among all rightsholders in accordance with the shares selected by the rightsholders on the platform.

Royalties are defined as the portion of Net Licensing Revenues (amounts received after taxes and other deductions) from a license that includes your work less a 20% operations fee for CBH.

24. How and when will I get paid?

CBH pays royalties quarterly (every three months). You’ll be paid using the payment information in your platform account (you can sign up for a bank transfer or use services such as PayPal). You can also designate another party (like an agent) to receive payments on your behalf.

If a publisher is involved, CBH may pay them directly, however, CBH will first make efforts to split the payments and send your share directly to you. You’ll be able to track your earnings at any time through your account. (See CLA section 8.1.)