What Does AI Mean for Authors?
In case you missed it, read why I think AI will not destroy publishing here.
What I didn’t touch on in last week’s post was AI and authors. To put it bluntly, authors are PISSED about how most current AI tools work (including me).
Because: AI “learns” using creative work without permission (or payment).
Comedian, actress, and author Sarah Silverman — along with novelists Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey — are suing Open AI (the creators of ChatGPT) and Meta Platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) for violation of intellectual property law.
Essentially — as reported in Vulture — “OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s artificial-intelligence projects rely on the mass trawling of books to learn language and generate text, the suits say. Silverman’s suit contends that these AI projects didn’t secure her and other authors’ permission for using their works before inhaling them, violating intellectual-property law. They also claim that these AI systems gained access to these books via spurious means, using libraries of pirated texts — or as the suits’ co-attorney Matthew Butterick puts it to Vulture, ‘Creators’ work has been vacuumed up by these companies without consent, without credit, without compensation, and that’s not legal.’”
If this freaks you out, you’re not alone. My business runs on selling my intellectual property, and I felt pissed to realize that someone was giving it away for free without my permission.
I wanted to see whether I had been trolled, so I put questions about traditionally publishing a how-to book into ChatGPT. I got answers that were suspiciously similar to content that I had posted online. As I asked more detailed questions, the answers got even more similar.
Penguin Random House — the #1 traditional publisher in the world — sees this as copyright infringement, because it is.
While we can’t predict the future of AI or the myriad lawsuits currently in process, we can, as experts, thought leaders, and wannabe bestselling authors, continue to write — because defining, refining, and sharing our ideas is what will grow our businesses and ultimately get us that bestselling book.
