nonfiction

Gloria Steinem said: “The story of women’s struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organisation but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights.” The key then, for all of us trying to make the world a better place for women, is not to complain but to act.I am celebrating this International Women’s Day in the same week that my own initiative to promote women’s equality, the Women’s prize for fiction, announced its longlist, and in the same year that we launched the inaugural…

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Capitalism, artificial intelligence, Renaissance history and motherhood are among the topics explored in the books on the inaugural Women’s prize for nonfiction longlist.Sixteen women – including Guardian US columnist Naomi Klein, Observer art critic Laura Cumming and historian Tiya Miles – are now in the running for the £30,000 prize, launched last year to redress the relatively low numbers of women recognised in nonfiction prizes.The “groundbreaking” longlisted titles are “about redressing wrongs – so whether that’s…

This combination of photos shows "The Glass Constellation" by Arthur Sze, left, "The Bathysphere Book" by Brad Fox, center, and "Digging Stars" by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma. Credit: Copper Canyon Press/Astra House/W. W. Norton & Co. via AP A poetry collection, a coming-of-age novel and a history of deep sea exploration are unlikely to be found in the same section of your favorite bookstore. But they all have enough in common to be…

In November, a group of non-fiction authors filed a lawsuit accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of using other people's intellectual property without permission to train the former's generative AI technology. Now, more non-fiction writers are suing the companies for using their work to train OpenAI's GPT large language models (LLM). Journalists Nicholas A. Basbanes and Nicholas Gage are accusing the defendants of "massive and deliberate theft of copyrighted works" by writers like them in a proposed class action…

What are the trends in new nonfiction? From where I’m sitting, nature writing and major biography appear to be on their way down, history and health are still rising, and every other publisher’s list is littered, somewhat dispiritingly, with what they call genre-defying but I think of as bitty, not-one-thing-or-the-other kinds of books: group biographies of people about whom tons has already been written; collections of essays with no unifying theme; texts that combine fact with a certain kind of fiction in a sometimes…

A group of nonfiction authors has filed a lawsuit against U.S.-based tech giant Microsoft and artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI, alleging that the two companies trained its AI ChatGPT tool to copy their work without their consent.  In a complaint filed in the Manhattan federal court Tuesday, author Julian Sancton, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, alleged that he and thousands of other nonfiction authors did not receive any compensation for their work being copied by AI.  The complaint noted…

OpenAI and Microsoft have been hit with another lawsuit, this time from nonfiction authors, who claim that the tech companies have been training their AI chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot (formerly Bing Chat). This comes at a time when OpenAI and Microsoft both are involved in a chaotic situation over Sam Altman being fired as the CEO of OpenAI, and his next destination, which can either be being reinstated to his original position or taking over an AI research team at Microsoft.OpenAI, Microsoft…

OpenAI has been hit with another lawsuit, accusing it of using other people's intellectual property without permission to train its generative AI technology. Only this time, the lawsuit also names Microsoft as a defendant. The complaint was filed by Julian Sancton on behalf of a group of non-fiction authors who said they were not compensated for the use of their books and academic journals in training the company's large language model.In their lawsuit, the authors state how they spend years "conceiving, researching, and…

Canadian-American writer John Vaillant has won this year’s £50,000 Baillie Gifford prize for his book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, which judges said was both “exceptional” and “terrifying”.Fire Weather by John Vaillant. Photograph: Hodder & StoughtonVaillant’s book tells the story of the wildfires that struck Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada in 2016, while taking in the connected histories of the oil industry and climate science. It is the first book on the topic of the climate emergency to win the…