Authors are resisting AI with petitions and lawsuits. But they have an advantage: we read to form relationships with writers
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Tuesday, July 25, 2023
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In the United States last week, the Authors Guild submitted an open letter to the chief executives of prominent AI companies, asking AI developers to obtain consent from, credit and fairly compensate authors.
Key Points:
- In the United States last week, the Authors Guild submitted an open letter to the chief executives of prominent AI companies, asking AI developers to obtain consent from, credit and fairly compensate authors.
- The letter was signed by more than 10,000 authors and their supporters, including James Patterson, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Franzen and Margaret Atwood.
- Unpacking these concerns often reveals as much about existing practices of writing and publishing as it does about the new technology.
How does AI work?
- Such models examine how text is constructed, and essentially calculate the statistical likelihood certain words will appear together.
- In other words, generative AI creates a purely structural, probabilistic understanding of language and uses that to guess a plausible response.
- If you can access writing in your browser, it’s safe to assume AI models are using it.
- In the world’s first copyright-related ChatGPT lawsuit, two US authors (Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay) are currently suing OpenAI, claiming their books were used to train the AI software without their consent.
Can AI generate ‘human’ writing?
- Browsing Amazon in July 2023, 984 books explicitly attribute ChatGPT, the best-known and most widely used generative AI, as an author.
- But can generative AI produce acceptably human creative writing?
- These articles, however, are procedural, fill-in-the-blanks style affairs: a kind of computational madlibs of exchange rates and share prices.
- Similarly, unlike the AP example, this work is “original” insomuch as it is a new, previously non-existent piece of creative text.
- Read more:
Replacing news editors with AI is a worry for misinformation, bias and accountability
AI and ‘the bestseller code’
- The flurry of replies included authors such as Jennifer Brody, who managed to include AI protections in recent contract negotiations.
- Overwhelmingly, however, provisions regarding AI are not yet explicitly included in author contracts.
- At what point does a clause in an author contract regarding AI usage mean an author can’t use their own writing to generate new work?
- Publishers acquiring the right to use manuscripts to train generative AI is speculative.
- Some are suggesting AI will render the author disposable: publishers will be able to package and market any piece of AI-generated text.
What do we value?
- It’s that these are values are at the heart of reading and writing.
- Henry James wrote that the:
deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer. - deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer.