As if digital book piracy wasn’t already a threat to authors – I personally play an endless game of ‘whack-a-mole’ against sites that steal my titles – now comes the news that the developers of ChatGPT are accused of using pirate sites to hoover up titles to train their artificial intelligence programs.
Comedian Sarah Silverman launched a lawsuit last week against ChatGPT-maker OpenAI for copyright infringement. She claims that ChatGPT is able to produce such detail about every aspect of her 2010 memoir that there’s no way it hasn’t been fed the entire book, all without her permission or knowledge. She contends the text was likely stolen from what her suit calls ‘a shadow library’ of pirated books.
Earlier I mentioned that the Screen Writers Guild was striking over the use of AI to generate scripts for movies. Now comes the Silverman suit and the fact that late last month a group of 900 authors, members of The Writers’ Guild including Jodi Picoult, Nora Roberts, Margaret Atwood, and James Patterson, have signed a letter protesting against the use of their works to train AI. They contend – quite soundly – that this will enable anyone to create novels in their styles at the press of a button, devaluing their own work.
Not all authors are household names like Picoult, Patterson, Steven King, or Patricia Cornwell. They are the ones who’ve reached stratospheric heights with millions of book sold, the ones whose novels get made into movies. But there are many more thousands of authors who write for much smaller but no less enthusiastic audiences while hoping for that breakout hit or the film option on one of their titles that will propel them into the upper ranks.
Prolific authors who are retired from working life or who have been hard-working and fortunate enough to earn a living wage from writing can turn out several full-length novels a year writing nine to five. Authors like me, who hold down a day job to pay the bills, do well to manage one or two full-length titles and a novella in a year. To do this, we sacrifice our social lives and time with loved ones to write as much as we can after a day at work and on weekends.
Is it fair for AI companies to undermine that effort? And how would you feel to find your new favorite author doesn’t actually exist – that you’ve been, in effect, ‘catfished’ for your money by people stealing and rearranging real authors’ work?
