Artificial_Intelligence
Quick Facts
The humanities have long leaned on traditional publishing models, and the advent of AI is now exposing deep-rooted inequities in that system.
Many academic authors, especially in humanities fields, sign publishing contracts granting rights over their work to firms that then monetise access to large back-catalogues, including licensing to AI companies.
In one example the publisher Taylor & Francis—via parent Informa PLC—earned over US $75 million in 2024 from data-access licensing, naming AI companies among its clients.
Critically, students are being penalised for using AI-writing tools even as their professors’ work is supplied unabated to commercial platforms that fuel AI development.
The author argues that publishing-industry profits based on academic work underline a contradiction: the very output being used to generate AI models is often created under conditions of minimal consent or compensation for the original human scholars.
The proposed solution is less about policing AI use among students and more about reimagining the scholarly ecosystem so that AI integration is collaborative, transparent and fair.
Momentum Tracker
🔺 AI-driven publication access is accelerating business-models that monetise academic content, prompting calls for structural reform in scholarly publishing.
🔻 Humanities scholars and students face growing tension: stricter scrutiny of AI use in writing while institutional systems continue to enable AI-fuelled commercialisation of academic labour.