When novelist Douglas Preston first started messing around with ChatGPT, he gave the AI software a challenge: could it write an original poem based on a character from some of his books?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt came out with this terrific poem written in iambic pentameter,\u201d Preston recalls. The result was impressive \u2013 and concerning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat really surprised me was how much it knew about this character; way more than it possibly could have gleaned from the internet,\u201d Preston says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The adventure writer suspected that the chatbot had somehow absorbed his work, presumably as part of the training process by which an artificial intelligence model ingests lots of data that it then synthesises into seemingly original content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat was a very disturbing feeling,\u201d Preston says, \u201cnot unlike coming home and finding that someone\u2019s been in your house and taken things.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those worries led Preston to sign on to a proposed class action lawsuit accusing OpenAI, the developer behind ChatGPT and a major player in the growing AI industry, of copyright infringement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Preston is joined in the suit by a host of other big-name authors, including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, Jodi Picoult and George R.R. Martin \u2013 the notoriously slow-to-publish Game of Thrones author who, Preston says, joined out of frustration that fans were using ChatGPT to preemptively generate the last book in his series.
OpenAI, for its part, has contended that training an AI system falls under fair use protections, especially given the extent to which AI transforms the underlying training data into something new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A spokesman for OpenAI said the firm respects authors\u2019 rights and believes they should \u201cbenefit from AI technology\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe\u2019re having productive conversations with many creators around the world, including the Authors Guild, and have been working cooperatively to understand and discuss their concerns about AI,\u201d the spokesman said of America\u2019s oldest and largest organisation for published writers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe\u2019re optimistic we will continue to find mutually beneficial ways to work together to help people utilise new technology in a rich content ecosystem.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nevertheless, the publishing industry is pushing back as it reckons with a software boom that\u2019s given anyone with Wi-fi the power to automatically generate large reams of text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In addition to Preston\u2019s suit, various other groups of authors are pursuing their own proposed class action suits against OpenAI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cEverybody\u2019s realising to what extent their data, their information, their creativity, has been absorbed,\u201d says Ed Nawotka, an editor at American trade news publication Publishers Weekly. There is, in the industry, a degree of \u201cabject panic\u201d, he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In one recent pair of lawsuits, American comedian and actress Sarah Silverman accused OpenAI as well as Meta \u2013 Facebook\u2019s parent company and a major AI developer itself \u2013 of copyright infringement. The two companies have since pushed to get most of Silverman\u2019s cases dismissed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A different suit recently found Paul Tremblay (The Cabin at the End of the World) and Mona Awad (Bunny) suing OpenAI for copyright violations \u2013 the company is trying to get that one mostly dismissed too \u2013 while Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen\u2019s Union) is a plaintiff in two additional legal actions that are targeting OpenAI and Meta, respectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And in July, the Authors Guild \u2013 a professional trade group, not a labour union \u2013 sent several technology companies an open letter calling for consent, credit and fair compensation when writers\u2019 works are used to train AI models.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Among the signatories were Margaret Atwood, Dan Brown, James Patterson, Suzanne Collins, Roxane Gay and Celeste Ng.
That\u2019s all on top of the nearly five-month-long strike that Hollywood screenwriters recently undertook that led to, among other things, new regulations on the use of AI for script generation. A separate strike, still ongoing, has found screen actors rallying around AI concerns of their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The lawsuit in which Preston is involved, which features 17 other named plaintiffs including the Authors Guild, claims that OpenAI copied the authors\u2019 works \u201cwithout permission or consideration\u201d to train AI programs that now compete with those authors for readers\u2019 time and money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The suit also takes issue with ChatGPT\u2019s generation of derivative works, or \u201cmaterial that is based on, mimics, summarises, or paraphrases [the] Plaintiffs\u2019 works, and harms the market for them\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The plaintiffs are seeking damages for their lost licensing opportunities and \u201cmarket usurpation\u201d, as well as an injunction against future such practices, on behalf of American fiction authors whose copyrighted works were used to train OpenAI software.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey didn\u2019t ask our permission, and they aren\u2019t compensating us,\u201d Preston says of OpenAI. \u201cWhat they\u2019ve done is created a very valuable commercial product which can reproduce our voices. \u2026 It\u2019s basically theft of our creative work on a grand scale.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since the plaintiffs\u2019 books aren\u2019t freely available on the open web, he adds, OpenAI \u201calmost certainly\u201d accessed them via alleged piracy sites such as the file-sharing platform LibGen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
OpenAI declines to answer a question about whether the plaintiffs\u2019 books were part of ChatGPT\u2019s training data or accessed via file-sharing sites such as LibGen. In a statement to the US Patent and Trademark Office cited in the Authors Guild suit, OpenAI stated that modern AI systems are sometimes trained on publicly available data sets that include copyrighted works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Michael Connelly, the author of the Harry Bosch series of crime novels and another plaintiff in the Authors Guild lawsuit, framed those concerns as a matter of control: \u201ccontrol of your own work, your own property.\u201d
Connelly never got to decide whether his books would be used to train an AI, he said, but if he\u2019d been asked \u2013 even if there were money on the table \u2013 he would probably have opted out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The idea of ChatGPT writing an unofficial Bosch sequel strikes him as a violation; even when Amazon adapted the series into a TV show, he says, he had some control over the scripts and casting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThese characters belong to us,\u201d Connelly says. \u201cThey come out of our heads. I even put stuff in my will about [how] no other author can carry the Harry Bosch torch after I\u2019m gone. He\u2019s mine, and I don\u2019t want anyone else telling his story. I certainly don\u2019t want a machine telling it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But whether the law will allow the machines to do so is a different question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The various lawsuits against OpenAI allege copyright violations. But copyright law \u2013 and especially fair use, the area of law governing when copyrighted work can be incorporated into other endeavours, such as for the sake of education or criticism \u2013 still doesn\u2019t offer a cut-and-dried answer to how these lawsuits will shake out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got kind of a push and pull right now in the case law,\u201d says intellectual property lawyer Lance Koonce, a partner at the law firm Klaris, pointing to two recent US Supreme Court cases that offer competing models of fair use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In one, Authors Guild vs. Google, the court held that Google was allowed to digitise millions of copyrighted books to make them searchable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the other, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc. vs. Goldsmith, the court found that the titular pop artist\u2019s incorporation of a photographer\u2019s work into his own art didn\u2019t fall under fair use because Warhol\u2019s art was commercial and had the same basic purpose as the original photo.
\u201cThese AI cases \u2013 and especially the Authors Guild case [against OpenAI] \u2013 fall into that tension,\u201d Koonce said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In its patent office statement, OpenAI argued that training artificial intelligence software on copyrighted works \u201cshould not, by itself, harm the market for or value of copyrighted works\u201d because the works are being consumed by software rather than real people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Outside of legal avenues, stakeholders are already pitching solutions to this tension.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suman Kanuganti, the chief executive of AI messaging platform Personal.ai, says the tech industry will probably adopt some sort of attribution standard that allows people who contribute to an AI\u2019s training data to be identified and compensated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOnce you build the models with known, authenticated data units, then technologically, it\u2019s not a challenge,\u201d Kanuganti says. \u201cAnd once you solve that problem \u2026 the economic association then becomes easier.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Preston, the adventure novelist, agrees that there may yet be a path forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Licensing books to software developers through a centralised clearing house could provide authors with a new income stream while also securing high-quality training data for AI companies, he says, adding that the Authors Guild tried to set up such an arrangement with OpenAI at one point but that the two sides were unable to reach an agreement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe were trying to get them to sit down with us in good faith; we\u2019re not opposed at all to AI,\u201d Preston says. \u201cIt\u2019s not a zero-sum game.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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