Veteran journalists Nicholas Gage, 84, and Nicholas Basbanes, 81, who live near each other in the same Massachusetts town, each devoted decades to reporting, writing and book authorship.
Gage poured his tragic family story and search for the truth about his mother’s death into a bestselling memoir that led John Malkovich to play him in the 1985 film “Eleni.” Basbanes transitioned his skills as a daily newspaper reporter into writing widely-read books about literary culture.
Basbanes was the first of the duo to try fiddling with AI chatbots, finding them impressive but prone to falsehoods and lack of attribution. The friends commiserated and filed their lawsuit earlier this year, seeking to represent a class of writers whose copyrighted work they allege “has been systematically pilfered by” OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft.
“It’s highway robbery,” Gage said in an interview in his office next to the 18th-century farmhouse where he lives in central Massachusetts.
The noise is a big problem for all of us, not just artists. The entire internet is getting flooded with just awful content.
As I see it, the problem is the little piecemeal work that artists do to get by is going to disappear. AI can write clickbait stories and such because really once someone clicks it the quality of the article barely matters. I’m going to guess that isn’t the writing you have a passion for, but it might be the writing you or others do to put food on the table between writing your passion projects.
That’s a completely legitimate concern to see that work going away. As much as I fucking hate that stuff, I’d rather a writer get paid to exercise their craft than to have it written by an AI. I don’t have a good answer for that. Those jobs might legitimately go away. They are low effort, short pieces of bullshit like AI excels at. As a programmer, many of the easy parts of my work are also disappearing leaving only the hard stuff.
I don’t know. I don’t want AI to go away. It’s a useful tool for certain things, but it really complicates the journey from novice to master in several fields. I do know it won’t be able to meet the high hopes some folks have. Anyway, I’m trying to be upbeat without being dismissive of your concerns because they are completely valid. I wish you the best.
