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.
My problem is less “someone might make a thing that arts better than real artists”
It’s more “someone is absolutely committed to making that thing using the labor of the artists they intend to marginalize and not only is nobody is stopping them, tons are cheering”
Because it’s not stealing. No one is losing anything. In fact you should pay chatgpt for incorporting your work instead of just readting and discarding or forgetting it.
Decades of draconian copyright law really scrambled our brains until we forgot there was anything other than copyright, eh?
I’m not saying it’s stealing. I’ve been in favor of sampling, scraping, and pirating since the 90s. Culture is a global conversation. It’s perhaps the most important thing we’ve ever invented. And you have an innate right to participate, regardless of your ability to pay the tolls enacted by the chokepoint capitalists. I’m not against piracy, and I’m not in favor of expanding copyright law.
I’m against letting market forces – those very same chokepoint capitalists – signal-jam that all-important conversation for their own profit. I’m in favor of enforcing already-existing antitrust law. Something we’ve conveniently forgotten how to do for the past 70 years.
Charge them with anti-competitive business practices. Make them start over with artists who want to nurture their digital doppelgangers. That’s fine. Just don’t tell me the only option is “You must compete against an algorithmically-amplified version of yourself from now on, until you give up or you’re done perfecting it”.
I just wanted to say, it’s refreshing to read a well argumented comment such as this one. It’s good to see every once in a while there are still some people thinking things through without falling for automatic hatred to either side of a discussion.
I would love to hear your opinion on something I keep thinking about. There’s the whole idea that these LLMs are training on “available” data all over the internet, and then anyone can use the LLM and create something that could resemble the work of someone else. Then there’s the people calling it theft (in my opinion wrong from any possible angle of consideration) and those calling it fair use (I kinda lean more on this side). But then we have the side of compensation for authors and such, which would be great if some form for it would be found. Any one person can learn about the style of an author and imitate it without really copying the same piece of art. That person cannot be sued for stealing “style”, and it feels like the LLM is basically in the same area of creating content. And authors have never been compensated for someone imitating them.
So… What would make the case of LLMs different? What are good points against it that don’t end up falling into the “stealing content” discussion? How to guarantee authors are compensated for their works? How can we guarantee that a company doesn’t order a book (or a reading with your voice in the case of voice actors, or pictures and drawings, …) and then reproduces the same content without you not having to pay you? How can we differentiate between a synthetic voice trained with thousand of voices but not the voice of person A but creates a voice similar to that of A against the case of a company “stealing” the voice of A directly? I feel there’s a lot of nuances here and don’t know what or how to cover all of it easily and most discussion I read are just “steal vs fair use” only.
Can this only end properly with a full reform of copyright? It’s not like authors are nowadays very well protected either. Publishers basically take their creation to be used and abused without the author having any say in it (like in the case of spot if unpublished a artists relationship and payment agreements).
