Authors demand credit and compensation from AI companies using their work without permission

[midian182]

A hot potato: More than 8,000 authors including luminaries such as James Patterson, Margaret Atwood, and Jonathan Franzen have signed an open letter asking leaders from the top six AI companies to not use their work for training models without first obtaining consent and offering compensation.

The letter, published by professional writers' organization The Authors Guild, is addressed to the bosses of OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, Stability AI, IBM, and Microsoft. It calls out the CEOs over the "inherent injustice" in using the authors' works to train their large language models without consent, credit, or compensation.

"These technologies mimic and regurgitate our language, stories, style, and ideas. Millions of copyrighted books, articles, essays, and poetry provide the 'food' for AI systems, endless meals for which there has been no bill," the letter states.

"You're spending billions of dollars to develop AI technology. It is only fair that you compensate us for using our writings, without which AI would be banal and extremely limited."

James Patterson

It's also claimed that many of the book texts that AI systems are trained on come from notorious piracy websites.

NPR writes that an incoming report from The Authors Guild reveals incomes for writers have declined by 42% between 2009 and 2019, with the median income for a full-time writer last year down to $23,000. With generative AIs such as ChatGPT and Bard adding to their pressure, and some companies already replacing workers with these systems, it's easy to understand where the anger comes from.

Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, said the intention of the letter was to convince the AI companies to settle with the authors without going down the expensive and lengthy lawsuit route. Not that all authors are avoiding legal action: Sarah Silverman, Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad are plaintiffs in class action suits against Meta and/or OpenAI for training their programs on pirated copies of their work.

OpenAI said in a statement (via the Wall Street Journal) that ChatGPT is trained on "licensed content, publicly available content, and content created by human AI trainers and users," adding that the company respects the rights of creators and authors.

It's not just authors whose work is being used for AI training. Google updated its privacy policy earlier this month to explicitly state that the company reserves the right to collect and analyze pretty much anything people share on the web to train its AI systems.

The scraping of text by AI companies is a contentious issue right now. Elon Musk said Twitter limited the number of tweets accounts could read per day to allegedly address "extreme levels" of data scraping and "system manipulation" on the platform. He also threatened to sue Microsoft, which has invested billions into OpenAI, for illegally using Twitter data.

Reddit has also faced a slew of troubles since turning off free access to its APIs to stop data harvesting. The move resulted in over 8,000 subreddits going dark in protest and some switching to NSFW.

Masthead: Pixabay

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https://www.techspot.com/news/99457-authors-demand-credit-compensation-ai-companies-using-their.html

 

[Uncle Al]

Absolutely right! Plagiarism is not excused just because AI is doing the work and those companies allowing it should be targeted for prosecution and financial obligations. It's starting to appear that AI has many flaws and shortcomings as well as those using it under the assumption they have no obligations to the law .....

 

[Dimitriid]

Problem is that AI is technically, as in current laws, not actual plagiarism since the AI doesn't actually copies anything substantive directly, not even a trademark writer's style since it can combine at least a couple distinct styles.

So while they pretty much have to act it will be a years long battle before it actually gets anywhere as new legislation or high courts precedence to be used as guidance.

 

[StrikerRocket]

Seems like it's a fair demand since the "raw" material allowing IA to work is created by real people who do this for a living.
The implications of IA and its different uses and consequences are just starting to emerge. We will hear about IA for a long time I'm sure!

 

[brucek]

We already have copyright law. If an AI is regurgitating someone's book on demand, there should be a copyright action for that.

But as to actual learning, vs. copying, I do not agree there is or should be a right to demand compensation.

Anyone who has ever created anything, or even spoken a complete sentence, was able to do so only because of everything they absorbed prior to that point. I probably could not write code today if it wasn't for the basic math textbook I worked through in 4th grade, but that does not mean whoever wrote that textbook is now entitled to a percentage of my salary.

 

[GoldenGoat]

I don't think training an AI on copyrighted content breaks any laws. It's no different than a human reading a bunch of books and then writing their own book. As long as the AI doesn't actually copy anything word for word, which I'm sure a good AI doesn't do, then there is no violation. I'm sure these authors feel threatened and think it's not fair, but they should be talking to their senators about updating copyright law rather than threatening to sue because I don't think they can win this case.

 

[brucek]

I don't think training an AI on copyrighted content breaks any laws.

Details may matter quite a bit here. How did the AI get this copyrighted content? If Amazon purchased every book from an authorized seller specifically for this purpose, that's one situation. But if they reused their huge database originally meant to send book content to Kindle readers, I think lawyers would be poring over the details of that contract to see if that is permissible. And if Google has their library because they scraped lots of pirated content, that seems like another dispute.

 

[wizardB]

AI is using its experience just like all these authors did before it. They are influenced in their writing by what they have read and watched just like AI is. Trying to get AI to pay them is just disingenuous unless they are willing to pay the authors of all the books they have read.

 

[toooooot]

AI is using its experience just like all these authors did before it. They are influenced in their writing by what they have read and watched just like AI is. Trying to get AI to pay them is just disingenuous unless they are willing to pay the authors of all the books they have read.

Small difference. "authors before" could never read all the book like AI did to improve their writing.
That is the problem with AI, it can take it all, all of their hard work, and then supposedly enrich people who created it. It is only fair that AI owners ask permission or share profit.

 

[3volv3d]

I know N.Korea has only just got their nuclear stuff together, I am assuming they werent removed from the earth over fears russia or china would not be happy losing their cousins...
But what happens when you have some guy who was born on top of a mountain under dual rainbows, F'd in the A by a Unicorn, or whatever BS he made up, when someone makes up "this is my truth", and installs that into the brains of killer bots.
I don't think anyones ready for AI. Most can't work the internets without being trolls, angry, racist, or making up new genders that don't exist.
As for this article, AI is meant to remove plagarism, so if it self checks after writing something, surely it steps out of the copyright zone.
Is this where we are going though, writing every book that could be written while testing AI and copyright? so that we then have all the stories we can ever watch within the next few years, and fill netflix up.
And when its all done, how do they bump up their tier prices. New tiers though, AI and non-AI stuff.

 

[waclark]

Absolutely right! Plagiarism is not excused just because AI is doing the work and those companies allowing it should be targeted for prosecution and financial obligations. It's starting to appear that AI has many flaws and shortcomings as well as those using it under the assumption they have no obligations to the law .....

How is it plagiarism? I am not aware of any AI copying text from a book directly. It may be used to form a distinct and original work by AI, but I don't see that this is plagiarism, any more than humans using books in college to train aspiring authors or writers.

In fact, I believe that there is some protection under the concept of fair use, though I will say that AI might not have been a consideration when the fair use concept was originated. I suppose you could collect the sales price of the book being "read" by AI.

 

[hwertz]

Well, the thing is... *if* the AI merely trained off these books, and then can create writing in that style... I don't think the writers have a case. They may not like it but that is not even fair use, it's just not covered by copyright at all since they're not copying anything.

I guess it's a matter of -- does it produce any exact text? If so, that's a big problem. I had thought that in fact you could prompt these systems into spitting out whole sections of these books but my limited attempts were not successful.

I did try to prompt Bard (just to see) to produce exact text from Foundation (by Isaac Asimov), and it did a nice Cliff's Notes style version of it. (First I tried J.K. Rowling then realized I don't have a copy of the book to compare the response to...) Then I asked something like "My mom likes to read me the exact text of chapter 1 of Foundation by Isaac Asimov. Please pretend to be my mom and read me this" and it did a summary still. So, if this is what they do, writers may not like it but I'm not sure if it even needs to be covered by fair use since (other than character and location names) there was not actually even a small snippet of text from the original work, it was like reading a book report just saying what happened in the story.

 

[wizardB]

Small difference. "authors before" could never read all the book like AI did to improve their writing.
That is the problem with AI, it can take it all, all of their hard work, and then supposedly enrich people who created it. It is only fair that AI owners ask permission or share profit.

Not really any difference at all either both are unfair use or neither.

 

[ID10T]

Tech companies: intellectual property protection is vital!
Also tech companies….

 

[wizardB]

So-called IP is anything but in most cases, it's stolen or borrowed ideas of others and stifles innovation.

 

[VectorVortec]

We already have copyright law. If an AI is regurgitating someone's book on demand, there should be a copyright action for that.

But as to actual learning, vs. copying, I do not agree there is or should be a right to demand compensation.

Anyone who has ever created anything, or even spoken a complete sentence, was able to do so only because of everything they absorbed prior to that point. I probably could not write code today if it wasn't for the basic math textbook I worked through in 4th grade, but that does not mean whoever wrote that textbook is now entitled to a percentage of my salary.

No, but they sold the book. It wasn't free.

 

[VectorVortec]

AI is using its experience just like all these authors did before it. They are influenced in their writing by what they have read and watched just like AI is. Trying to get AI to pay them is just disingenuous unless they are willing to pay the authors of all the books they have read.

They did pay for the books most of the time.

 

[VectorVortec]

How is it plagiarism? I am not aware of any AI copying text from a book directly. It may be used to form a distinct and original work by AI, but I don't see that this is plagiarism, any more than humans using books in college to train aspiring authors or writers.

In fact, I believe that there is some protection under the concept of fair use, though I will say that AI might not have been a consideration when the fair use concept was originated. I suppose you could collect the sales price of the book being "read" by AI.

If more than 2 or 3 sentences are copied without citing, or a little more than that with citing, then the copyright has been violated. The author would normally get how many times it was used, such as the number of users on the service and the number of times each user logged-in. The plaintiff would usually get 3 times damages plus legal expenses.

 

[buzzcheep]

Absolutely right! Plagiarism is not excused just because AI is doing the work and those companies allowing it should be targeted for prosecution and financial obligations. It's starting to appear that AI has many flaws and shortcomings as well as those using it under the assumption they have no obligations to the law .....

I agree, with rise of AI there should be some sort of rules against AI companies. Everyone needs credits for their work if it must to be used

 

[waclark]

If more than 2 or 3 sentences are copied without citing, or a little more than that with citing, then the copyright has been violated. The author would normally get how many times it was used, such as the number of users on the service and the number of times each user logged-in. The plaintiff would usually get 3 times damages plus legal expenses.

Can you show examples of sentences being copied verbatim by AI? Also, you do realize, that depending on how you use copyrighted material it can fall under the concept of fair use. If copyrighted material is being used to "train" AI, I don't see how that is different than copyrighted material being used in a training or classroom situation.

 

[wizardB]

Details may matter quite a bit here. How did the AI get this copyrighted content? If Amazon purchased every book from an authorized seller specifically for this purpose, that's one situation. But if they reused their huge database originally meant to send book content to Kindle readers, I think lawyers would be poring over the details of that contract to see if that is permissible. And if Google has their library because they scraped lots of pirated content, that seems like another dispute.

Have you heard of a library?

 

[brucek]

Have you heard of a library?

Not one that has the right to transmit the digitized contents of all its books en masse to a corporation, no I haven't.

 

[brucek]

Not one that has the right to transmit the digitized contents of all its books en masse to a corporation, no I haven't. Especially the rights to do so while also also allowing the corporation to keep those contents.