Tag: chatbots

The Authors Guild Class Action Against OpenAI

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

The Authors Guild and a number of well-known writers have brought a class action against OpenAI and its various subsidiary corporations and partnerships alleging violations of copyright law in its use of materials to develop its large language models (LLMs), including ChatGPT.

For eight years I made my living as the primary legal editor of a publication that covered class actions and while that was some years back, I still know a lot about the subject. So I read through the complaint — you can find it here in PDF form — and have some thoughts.

Here’s the court record if you want to look up more information.

First of all, this action was brought by a very sophisticated and prominent firm of class action lawyers, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein. Headquartered in San Francisco, the firm has been a major player in complex litigation since 1972, handling among other things some of the major tobacco cases, litigation over the Exxon Valdez, and other major product liability and class actions.

The other firm in the case, Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard, is very experienced in copyright and technology law, according to their website.

Secondly, the case was brought in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Given the number of publishers located in New York, that’s an obvious place to bring an action related to copyright. It’s assigned to Judge Sidney H. Stein, who was appointed by Bill Clinton.

A quick google search indicates that Judge Stein has handled a number of copyright cases.

Thirdly, this suit is only against OpenAI (in its many legal forms) and over ChatGPT and the other versions of that software. Given that there are other companies doing the same thing, I have no doubt that more suits will follow.

Fourth, this case is strictly over violations of copyright law in using work by authors of fiction. The proposed class includes works of fiction covered by registered copyrights that have sold at least 5,000 copies and that were used in programming the LLMs.

Again, this leaves out a lot of copyrighted materials that could be the subject of other suits, including nonfiction and books that sold fewer copies but were still used in developing the software.

And fifth, because they’ve restricted the case to books with properly registered copyrights, they can seek statutory damages based on violation of copyright law. That allows them to get around a major problem in class actions of a huge number of class members with very different actual damages. Continue reading “The Authors Guild Class Action Against OpenAI”…

Keep Your Grubby Bots Off My Work

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

Several authors are suing the companies making the chatbots marketed as “AI” for using their copyrighted material without permission to create that software. I don’t know if this litigation will be successful, but I know that it should be.

We are all entitled to read books and learn from them. However, if I want to use an idea from someone’s book in my own work, I have to give them credit.

This is why we have footnotes and bibliographies in nonfiction. This is why we credit lines of poetry or songs by other people in stories. And this is why you have to pay the creator if you’re going to do more than use a small amount of their work and point people to the original.

Someone did a lot of work to create that story or essay or poem or song or whatever material you’re referring to. They deserve credit and if you’re going to use a whole lot of what they did, they deserve to be paid.

It’s very simple.

One of the many real issues with the large language model chatbots is that they were developed using materials available online, both pictures and words, but the developers refuse to tell us what materials were used. They claim it’s proprietary.

But it’s very obvious that they are using stories and art created by specific people, because if you ask one of those bots to draw you a picture in the style of a specific artist or to write a story in the style of a specific writer, they can do it.

It’s not just famous writers and artists either, much less people who are long dead and whose work is out of copyright. Several of my friends have tried it and had it create works that sound plausibly similar to their own.

If software can “write” a story that sounds like something I would do, they must have incorporated my work into their database. That, to me, is the equivalent of stealing my work and publishing it as your own.

I don’t know if the interpreters of copyright law will agree, but it’s certainly worth trying.

I note that the chatbot companies say they are “training” the bots on this material, but that word would only be appropriate if the bots were, in fact, some kind of intelligent being. They’re not. They’re a repository of data that has been developed to regurgitate information with simple prompts. Continue reading “Keep Your Grubby Bots Off My Work”…

An Aikido Approach to Chatbots

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

Tools can be useful,
but don’t count on them to think.
Use them mindfully.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that the discussion of guns for self defense all seem to start — and end — with the purchase of said gun. Perhaps a few of those who hold the view that “an armed society is a polite society” (to quote Robert Heinlein) also advocate serious training, but it’s easy to get the impression that too many people think owning the gun is all you need to protect yourself.

I wrote a story about this called “Survival Skills.” In it an Aikido sensei told the protagonist that no tool is ever ultimately the answer. The protagonist had to learn the core truth of that the hard way, though.

I bring this up because all the furor about the AI chat bots has skipped over analyzing them as a tool that has both benefits and flaws. Some people are already using them to replace humans, without paying any attention to some of their significant flaws. (A writing program that makes up facts and cites non-existent articles is not a tool to rely on.)

And the scammers are already out in full force: people are submitting chatbot written stories to magazines. The biggest problem from the magazine POV is not separating them out from real stories — that’s pretty easy — but the fact they flood the inbox, exhausting the editor who has to deal with them.

Nobody’s going to make any money sending chatbot stories to magazines, but someone’s probably making money teaching people how to do that.

My Aikido teacher used to occasionally say, “I teach philosophy,” meaning that Aikido is so much more than a physical practice. I try to apply the principles of Aikido to other aspects of life.

I just applied two Aikido principles to the discussion of chatbots: relying on a tool when you don’t understand what you’re doing with it and acting without integrity. Aikido teaches you to avoid both of those things. Continue reading “An Aikido Approach to Chatbots”…

Who Counts as a Person?

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

Back in 2002 I wrote a story about an upper-middle-class young man who got arrested in Louisiana because his physical appearance contradicted his sex genotype: he looked male, but his genotype was XX. He ended up in a jail cell with several transwomen, some drag queens, a lesbian, and a woman who was his opposite: she appeared female but had an XY sex genotype.

This story was set in 2023.

I believed in this story, so I sent it out to every magazine and anthology I could think of. Nobody wanted it. I don’t know why they didn’t like it, but perhaps it was because it seemed too unlikely at the time. Or maybe I was just ahead of the curve in gender stories.

Fast forward to the actual 2023, where Tennessee just adopted a law restricting drag shows and many other states are in the process of following suit. My made-up Louisiana law prohibiting people from dressing or appearing in a way that contradicts their sex genotype no longer looks like science fiction.

It’s almost enough to make me send the story out again, except that these days I bet magazines would turn it down because it’s too much like the real world of today.

Thinking about it reminded me of another story of mine, one I wrote back in the 1990s. It turned on whether clones were people or property under the U.S. Constitution.

That one, called “Passing,” did get published. In fact, it won a contest sponsored by the National Law Journal. Continue reading “Who Counts as a Person?”…