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John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and more authors sue OpenAI for copyright infringement
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Like the other commenter, I would be genuinely curious to hear your thoughts on that fundamental difference.
I am by no means an AI expert, but my impressions is that AI sill needs to process each book and incorporate the new knowledge into its existing knowledge. Which at least from a surface level sounds a lot like what I do when I read a new book.
The fact that each AI is effectively a non-sapient slave of a person or corporation really doesn't change my opinion.
Have you ever had a reason to read much in a new or developing sub-genre? As a fan of LitRPG, a genre that virtually didn't exist 10 years ago, I can tell you with some certainty that everything is a derivative work of something. It is amazing how as soon as one author pulls in and idea from another genre, the next 30 novels that come out will have some variation of the same idea, and the 300 that follow it will each have variations of those.
I replied to the other guy with an answer on the difference. The TLDR IMO there's a difference between someone who has been inspired by another work and someone who has taken a work with the intent creating a product based on it.
It's one thing for those 30 LitRPG books to come out from authors who loved the concepts of the first book. It'd be another thing for a company to analyze what made the first book successful (for lack of a better word the author's style) and then create a tool that can release hundreds of LitRPG books a day flooding the market and making it harder for the original author to sell his work.
Also the authors of those inspired novels have the capacity to add their own creativity to their works an AI can only add the creativity from other's works.
Thank you for the response. I am not sure I agree with your exact stance, but you make several compelling points along the way.
Using the Fair Use doctrine is definitely a good way to narrow down where the dividing line is. I think we can easily agree that making a GRRM specific AI to make derivative, non-parody, commercial works would definitely be on the wrong side of the line.
When I was picturing the bots, I was picturing something more along the lines of AI bots that had consumed all human literary works, or at the very least all modern English literary works.
ChatGPT write me a short story where the Main Character is a Magical Golem that follows the Three Laws of Isaac Asimov. It should be written in the style of a Greek Tragedy but set in Feudal Japan. The Main Character should be able to gain in magical power until he eventually attempts to break into the Heavens. There should be gods trying to interfere in his ascension but not in ways the MC cannot resolve. Base the gods off of archetypes from Norse Mythology, but name them after characters from GRRM's game of thrones based on similar personality types.
Such a work would both be wholly derivative and yet wholly unique. Despite swiping GRRM's unique names this work should be perfectly fine in my mind. Edit: Even if it was commercialized.
I see what you're getting at but I feel that once we get past the GRRM specific example some of the same issues still remain.
For example if it was instead a GRRM & JK Rowling and wrote in a style of the two in my eyes it hasn't escaped the problem of the GRRM AI it's compounded them by adding one more author who's works is being used. Then we could extrapolate that out to it's true scale where it uses most written literature (although some presumably pub domain).
I just see it as if doing it to one person's work is wrong doing to two people's work aught to be twice as bad.
That's pretty much my opinion about this, too. It's not like GRRM invented dragons that were hatched from eggs or anything like that. Having said that, I do think it's problematic if the AI model belongs to a company and it's not transparent about what data is being used to train their model.