When two octogenarian buddies named Nick discovered that ChatGPT might be stealing and repurposing a lifetime of their work, they tapped a son-in-law to sue the companies behind the artificial intelligence chatbot.
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.
As someone who uses AI all the time to write fiction just for my own entertainment, AI in no way replaces actual authors because while it might be technically capable, it's garbage at big picture stuff. No theme or plot or foreshadowing that spans more than a handful of pages.
AI cannot do the craft of writing no matter how good it is at prose.
Not that there aren't valid concerns and all, but I think this is a fading fad.
Not that there aren't valid concerns and all, but I think this is a fading fad.
I'm worried authors are 1920s horses. Sure those cars seem unreliable and impractical now. But we can't see around the corner. The least they deserve is compensation for their works being used without proper license.
With ever-growing context windows, I have a feeling that it will only be a matter of time before it forces us to adapt. ChatGPT-4o is somewhat intimidating already, though I haven't used it as extensively as you have.
But at the same time, I really would prefer to be wrong about that.
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”
“AI” will probably get there someday, but I agree the tech is nowhere near there. Calling what we have now “intelligence” is a very strong stretch at best.
I mostly agree with you, but I don't think it's a fading fad. There was way too much AI hype, way too early. However, it gets gradually but noticeably better with each new release. It's been a game changer for my coworkers and me at work.
Our merciless greedy overlords will always choose software over human employees whenever they can. Software doesn't sleep, take breaks, call out sick, etc. Right now it makes too many mistakes. That will change.
Yes even for technical writing it's absolute shit. I once stumbled upon a book about postgresql with repetitive summaries and generally a very algorithmic, article-like pattern on literally every page.
I'm a writer. My partner is an artist. Almost all of our friends are writers or artists, or both. The meteoric rise of AI off the theft of hard work has been so soul crushing for us, and the worst part is how few people seem to care.
My 'favorite' is the argument that replacing jobs is what technology is meant to do.
This isn't just a job. If I won the lotto tomorrow, if I had billions and billions of dollars and never had to make another cent in my life, I would still be writing. Art is not just a production, it is a form of communication, between artist and audience, even if you never see them.
Writing has always been something like tossing a message in a bottle into a sea of bottles and hoping someone reads it. Even if the arguments that AI can never replace human writing in terms of quality is true, we're still drowned out by the noise of it.
LLMs are the first thing in the space to get "good enough" to cause this. But they won't be the last. Artists of all kinds across all media will be equally disheartened.
AI (as it has been presented -- not sentient, but these algorithmic approaches to generating content from existing patterns) is a great example of (some) STEM folks not understanding the social consequences of something before opening Pandora's Box. It's also a new way to steal.
What exactly do you think they've done? You should be proud. You accomplished your mission to put your work out on the internet for free to be consumed and now you're upset because it's being consumed by yet another program.
You were fine with Google scanning a your works and people reading them for free. What do you think is so different in the case of gpt tools?
Is it just me, or is this article written in a way to try to use their age (a non relevant information for the topic imo) as a way to get the negative sentiment people have against elderly people and try to pass the image that feeling wronged by the way companies are using their works is "old people behavior" and that younger people should feel pushed to embrace "the future" without questioning?
And the race to be the first law firm to win against AI continues. The law firms have run out of B-list celebrities to feed fears to, and now we've moved onto octogenarian authors. Surely, next up will be a class action suit by 6th graders complaining that Chat-GPT stole their "What I did over summer vacation" reports without citing references.