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Pearson has already sent out a cease-and-desist letter over use of its intellectual property:
Textbooks giant Pearson is currently taking legal action over the use of its intellectual property to train AI models, chief executive Andy Bird revealed today as the firm laid out its plans for its own artificial intelligence-powered products.
The firm laid out its plans on how it would use AI a week after its share price tumbled by 15% as American rival Chegg said its own business had been hurt by the rise of ChatGPT.
Those plans would include AI-powered summaries of Pearson educational videos, to be rolled out this month for Pearson+ members, as well as AI-generated multiple choice questions for areas where a student might need more help.
Bird said Pearson had an advantage as its AI products would use Pearson content for training, which he said would make it more reliable.
[...] Bird also said it was usually easy to tell what a large language model such as ChatGPT has been trained on, because "you can ask it".
Bird also sought to point out a difference between Pearson and Chegg, which focuses more on homework assistance.
"They are in a very different business to us," he said. "We see a great differentiator between what Chegg are offering and what Pearson+ are offering.
"We're in the business of helping you learn and improve your skills, not in the business of answering."
He added that - as Pearson was in the business of learning - its products would be hard to replace.
"If all we had to do was read a set of facts in order to learn, there'd be no need for schools, colleges and teachers."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Snotnose on Friday May 12, @12:49AM (3 children)
I went to college in the 80s, textbooks were 2/3 my cost. It pissed me off to no end that the used books were 99% the same as the new editions, the only difference being they moved chapters and problem numbers around.
Undergrad Algebra, Calculus, diffy Q's, Chemistry, Physics, English, and $diety knows how many other disciplines haven't changed in the past 50 years. There is no reason there can't be an open source PDF textbook for these classes, where it costs $5-$10 to print and bind them.
Fuck textbook publishers, they are a parasite on higher education.
I remember 1 English teacher who assigned a dozen books, all for $4-$20 at the local mega-bookseller. Problem was, he only used at most 1 chapter of each book. I remember 1 book he used 1 paragraph. That guy was an asshole.
I just passed a drug test. My dealer has some explaining to do.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by istartedi on Friday May 12, @02:02AM
I went in the late 80s and early 90s. Textbooks were expensive but by no means 2/3 of the cost. The book store would buy them back for 10% and sell them at something like 80% of new when used. It was a minor league grift compared to now. They hadn't invented Internet lock-ins yet. Listen to what the kids are saying, however bad your 80s/90s textbook experience, theirs is almost certainly worse. Of course the weaponization of online courseware pales in comparison to the financial WMDs that student loans are. We generally didn't have those either, and tuition was lower because the colleges knew that most students weren't taking out loans. Once financing becomes the norm in any business, costs always rise and the pay-as-you-go customer gets screwed because it's no longer "What can you afford", it's now "What payment can you afford", and when that payment is delayed, Whoooah, boy. No wonder it's so obscene. As unfair as it seems to let some of those loans go, the more I think about it the more I lean towards saying that it serves the bond holders right if they have to take pennies back on the dollar. These were predatory loans. Thing is, a good chunk of them are held by the government. Yes. We the People. We did it to ourselves. Stop hitting ourselves. Why are you hitting yourself? Hey look, there's something on your shirt...
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(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday May 12, @02:07AM
It's quite annoying when you get those very expensive books and they only use like a chapter or so. Those books are just made to copy, legal-smegal. Still nothing stops you from reading the rest of the book to. To get some actual value out of it. It should give you extra knowledge and context on the matter being described. This whole idea that you should just read certain pages, paragraphs or chapters is borderline idiocy. It's a book. You start at the start and read to the end.
I recall a professor that wrote a lot of books. So first he got paid by the university as a professor and to teach the class but he also used only/mainly his own books as literature for his classes so he also got paid by the students that had to buy his books. That is some evil academic genius level of thinking and planning.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday May 12, @12:56PM
In all fairness, the classes were a lot less expensive back then and printing books was proportionally more expensive. The typsetting alone was a lot more work than it is now. When it came to the second hand market, there were fewer options.
As far as opensource books go, that is a thing, a bunch of the classes that I'm taking currently use ones from openstax. In fact, before my mother retired, she was on a team that used grant money to write one that's now freely available to use for pretty much any purpose and can be remixed if you like. It can even be printed and bound to be like a regular book. It's been a bit since I check, but you could get a hardcover textbook custom printed with color for under $40. Which kind of makes sense. A lot of the cost is royalties and the logistics of storing and transporting large numbers of books. A one off book is in a sense more expensive to print, but with modern printing technology, even that isn't what it used to be.