OPINION:
Fiction writers are in an uproar about artificial intelligence creating new competition. They want large language models to either stop training on their work or for writers to be paid royalties.
It’s unclear what makes Nora Roberts, James Patterson or Margaret Atwood entitled to more protection and monopoly rights than a contract lawyer whose work can be automated. Perhaps it’s because they have the money to sue and the artistic hubris.
Like the Luddites, weavers in the 18th century who broke into factories to smash textile looms, they want special status to enshrine their employment by blocking new technology.
Chatbots built on generative AI technology — such as OpenAI’s Chat-GPT and Google’s Bard — can train by reading whatever is on the web: newspapers, industrial diagrams, open-source software, paintings, history, the classics, the Bible and modern fiction. Even the dry syllabus for my class on international business.
Those programs — admittedly with errors that we humans must weed out — can write accounts of historical events, news stories — if they have quick access to breaking information like a government release on inflation — and knockoffs of contemporary fiction.
An Authors Guild open letter to the CEOs of OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Stability AI and IBM — signed by the aforementioned writers and thousands of lesser lights — asks that software creators obtain their permission and pay fees to train large language models with their work even when copyright laws are not violated.
Students prepare for careers in writing — be it for news organizations or penning novels — by reading the classics, contemporary authors and the like. They don’t have to pay Ms. Atwood or the estate of Mark Twain to access their books at the library or pay royalties as they publish throughout their careers.
When the programs are used to appropriate whole settings and characters, it’s piracy, and writers can access the courts to obtain redress. But when chatbots generate the next iteration — work that is qualitatively distinct — those become no different from writers or painters who elaborate on what came before them. And all creative artists — save the tellers of the first neolithic tales and cave painters — do just that.
I doubt any successful modern mystery writer has not read Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle.
The problem for the computer coder, journalist, economist, industrial designer, artist and just about anyone earning a living manipulating symbols, numbers and words or putting colors on canvas is that these computer models are much more efficient than we are. We become more agile by applying those, and competition reduces our numbers in the workforce.
Grzegorz Rutkowski has studied the great masters like Caravaggio, Rembrandt and more contemporary artists to mimic their techniques and become an in-demand illustrator of beasts and landscapes for the video game industry.
Now AI programs have mimicked him along with other popular artists, and he has joined a class-action suit against several of the companies that developed these systems. But it’s hard to see how Dall-E 2 or Stable Diffusion, created by OpenAI and Stability AI, differs from an aspiring art student, or how Mr. Rutkowski copied other artists to gain fame.
It’s one thing for a chatbot to so appropriate language directly from J.D. Robb’s work and another to elaborate and create something new.
Prohibiting chatbots from reading her work or requiring royalties would be like requiring aspiring fiction writers at the University of Maryland to either not read her work or be taxed throughout their careers for anything that appears inspired by her style.
The price of fame and fortune is that others will emulate you. Even critics will appropriate your work to improve it.
The Authors Guild letter asserts that “generative AI threatens to damage our profession by flooding the market with mediocre, machine-written books, stories, and journalism based on our work.”
There’s the rub — much of what prominent authors do is somewhat formulaic — and it’s how someone like James Patterson has knocked out more than 200 novels.
Successful authors will continue to succeed by minting truly original work that strikes a chord with contemporary culture — artificial intelligence can replicate what’s on the shelf, but I doubt it can inspire.
Great writers carry a notebook or electronic device to record what they see — or they have remarkable memories. And from observation, they create something new and vital.
That’s why Ms. Roberts and others are financially successful, but so many also-rans who can slam a subject against a verb in an inadequately original or inspiring way earn an average of $23,000 a year.
The advent of radio, quality phonographs and motion pictures put many local music halls and singers out of business, but we still have the Metropolitan Opera and “La Scala.”
Fiction writers won’t become extinct, nor will artists like Grzegorz Rutkowski. But to thrive, like other professionals continually do, they will have to up their game.
• Peter Morici is an economist and an emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.
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