How do you assess a publisher's request to use your work to train AI?

Hi Academia,

I'm from a family of academics but shamefully I chose to quit study to become a lawyer. Not only does this hinder me greatly in my ability to participate in heated academic debate at Christmas dinner, it also makes me the 'family lawyer' on all petty legal matters in the same way my poor cousin (some kind of fancy software engineer) will forever be the family's IT support guy.

In the 80s my late Grandfather wrote a kind-of-niche political science book which was published by Cambridge University Press. Turns out his oldest kid (my Uncle) is the person listed with CUPress to receive (paltry) royalties and related communications and is presumably the rightsholder in the original book.

As you might be aware, CUPress is undertaking a process to get all its authors to expressly consent to having their works used in future AI licensing deals the publisher might enter into. I've come to understand that this might be kind of less evil than I initially thought, since some other publishers have just gone right ahead and cut the deals based on their existing arrangements with authors. In any case, my Uncle's received the form email asking him to opt into the deal, which would provide for him (and presumably his siblings, including my Mum) to receive a 20% cut of whatever proportion Grandad's book contributes to any future licensing deal. Uncle has asked for my opinion.

Now, as a lawyer in tech (not AI but increasingly AI adjacent) I maintain incredible levels of skepticism about the moral, ethical and legal consequences of the kind of AI CUPress is talking about here. My knee-jerk reaction is to tell CUPress to jam it. For one, without knowing what sort of deals they are looking to do (and they refuse to even speculate), and knowing they have tens of thousands of titles, I'm assuming that even large future licensing deals will not exactly provide my elders with a large chunk of cash.

On the other hand, some money is better than no money. And a quick google reveals that at the ery least Meta's AI has probably scraped Grandad's book (along with a bunch of articles I didn't even know he wrote) since they are all available on LibGen. I'm waiting on my Uncle to send through the original agreement between Grandad and CUPress but it could well be that any right in that agreement to create and exploit derivative works would, even in the absence of 'fair use', be enough to allow CUPress to include the book in future deals anyway, even though they promise they won't.

So yeah, I'm half interested in being able to give my Uncle some guidance about the money, but much much more interested in hearing what you would do if you were an author in the same situation. Which maybe you are!

Should I tell Cambridge to get fucked? Should I seek to appease the basilisk? What would you do?