It sounds simple, right? But is the average person going to know something's been stolen? There are so many independently-published authors on Amazon now, and while it's pretty obvious if someone's ripped off Star Trek or Harry Potter in a story available for a couple of dollars on Kindle, there are so many others who can be copied and most readers won't know it's ripped off because they're not familiar enough to spot them immediately and report them. And consider the issue of students who use this AI to write papers instead of writing original ones. Even if a student makes the effort to do original work, they could still get dinged for plagiarism if they unwittingly use a source that was created using AI and quote it or use it for another type of reference.
Sounds like a problem with the people using the tool, not the tool. I'm an average person, and I honestly would have very little idea if something is stolen or not, regardless of how it was created. Sounds like a problem with the people using the tool, not the tool. You shouldn't be copy-and-pasting into a paper... that's plagiarism no matter how the original work was created. Students need to take the information and rephrase it into their own words. If they're using AI to write their papers and it comes up plagiarized? Good. They didn't do the work. Again, literally nothing here is due to the tool, it's the people.
So, question: how does copyright law apply in this scenario -- if I enter a story description / plot line into the AI engine to make it spit out a 2500 word story, and then I put my name on it as the author .... is that legal? The machine wrote the story based off my input. Is that enough for me to claim the copyright?? If not, who can claim the copyright??
If it is your input, then I would think it would be your copyright. Well, outside of stuff created for franchises, that stuff is usually all claimed by the IP holder.
No they could not. Their source might get dinged for plagiarism, but if the student cited their source instead of trying to take credit for it, they aren't committing plagiarism. -Will
This is the real question, not "Should AI be banned", but "How do we adjust copyright laws to deal with AI". My opinion would be that if you used the AI to tool to generate a story, and that story isn't already copyrighted, then yes... the human who used the tool gets the copyright. I think the real issue is in looking at AI as anything other than a tool. That's all it is. Even if it gets to the point where it can generate original works that are indistinguishable from human works... it was still prompted by a human, and that human gets the credit for it. On a more philosophical level is where a disconnect happens. I personally think that is wonderful. It opens up creative expression to a much wider array of people who formerly had no real outlet for their creative expression. Sometimes it takes alot of work, but art takes some amount of natural talent. Alot of people just don't have it. I see the perspective of professional creatives... more people getting involved dilutes the pool and makes it harder on you, but my answer is... oh well? Technology changes, jobs shift due to it. With cheaply produced shoes, cobblers are no longer a particularly lucrative business. Should we ban sneakers to protect cobblers?
Here's one reason why I'm not wildly enthusiastic about someone feeding a few prompts to an AI and having it spit out a story that that someone will then take credit for "writing". I participate in NaNoWriMo three times/year, in April, July, and November. Outside of those months I'm still writing every single day, because there are stories in my head that I want to tell. NaNoWriMo is what finally enabled me to be disciplined about it, learning how to pace myself so I don't let things slide. This is what my current overall progress in this month's Camp NaNoWriMo looks like, as of last night: This is my daily word count, as of last night: Note that the daily word count is in the hundreds of words/day, and my goal for the month is 10,000 words. That's 334 words/day. That's an easy goal when someone has a good grasp of where the story is going and how to get there. On a good day I can knock that out in 15-20 minutes. On a bad day, even that little amount of words is a struggle. I've got two long-term projects on the go at once, because if writer's block hits me with one of them, I can switch to the other. I've had to do that a few times this month, or it could be a case of realizing that there are details I need for the story but would have to research them (both projects fall into the genre of historical fantasy and even though fantasy is part of them, I like to keep the historical parts as accurate as I plausibly can). Now this is just an April Camp event, when we can choose our own word count goals. Some people are much more ambitious than 10,000 words. Last year I wasn't well for much of the time so I chose a much easier goal for the April and July events. November doesn't allow choice. It's 50,000 words in 30 days that's necessary for a win, and that is NOT easy, or at least it's not easy for someone who isn't a professional who is always working to a deadline. If you get too far behind, it's a nightmare to catch up. The most I ever had to do in one day to catch up was over 8000 words. By the end of that day my hands and fingers hurt. I was physically and mentally exhausted, but I made it. The feeling of doing this successfully is amazing. Every one of those words that's measured in the graphs I posted represents work and creativity that came from me, over the course of the last 22 days, not from some friggin' AI that spat it out in less time than it takes me to type this sentence. Now consider this from the pov of a professional author. I'm not a professional. I do it for fun, not profit. Shrugging off their efforts as you did is basically spitting on every novel and short story that the professional authors on this forum have ever written. And that's just a tiny fraction of the people who create the stories that other people read.
How does somebody generating an AI story take away any of the personal satisfaction you derive from putting in the work to write something? If I play a video game on easy mode and you played it on hard, does that make the game less enjoyable for you because I played it on easy? Those mass produced Air Jordans are really spitting on every cobbler. You can go buy an entire manufactured box of nails at the hardware store. But what about the blacksmiths who put in the hours of work to craft nails in their forge?
Apples to oranges. Manual labor adjusted to advances in technology since the dawn of civilization. That's something we not only expect as a society, but also have laws and regulations to ease those transitions when they happen (This is a big part of what unions handle). But we're moving beyond manual labor now into creative output. And AI can't give you creative output without using my and others creative input. We talked about applying copyright laws. Absolutely. And my novel is copyrighted. If someone uses it in their AI training model, that is copyright infringement. There we go, copyright law applied. Beyond that, I have seen several people talk about how great it is that AI can allow them to "express their creativity" in a way they could not before. This is basically just a newer version of people who tell me "Hey, I have a great idea for a book! Why don't you write it?" I can't draw for shit. I struggle with stick pictures. I've also been interested in writing comic books since I was an undergrad, but I can't draw them. I could, I suppose, use AI to draw them, but I refuse. I'm not an illustrator, and I refuse to steal the hard work of people who actually can do it just to fill in the gaps in my own skills. By the same token, not everyone is a born writer. Many people would like to, but just like me with illustration, it isn't something they can do naturally. That doesn't mean you can't do it all, of course. I write professionally, but I also read voraciously. I've also been writing since I was in primary school. I majored in creative writing in undergrad and grad school. I've put in a hell of a lot of work to get where I am, and it's not even like I've made it all that far (yet). The people who think AI will "fix" their deficiencies are laboring under the idea that writing comes naturally to people. It does not. It takes work. A lot of reading, hours of time spent by yourself hammering out shitty sentence after shitty sentence, and an ability to recognize your own flaws and accept critical input. You want to write? I applaud you. I encourage it! But please don't think that AI will magically do that for you. All it does is cobble together a prompt with chunks of copyrighted material from other writers who put in the work I described.
My issue comes down to the chunks. Like, how far down the rabbit hole does copyright actually cover? Years back, some people tried to copyright individual music notes but were denied. The notes arranged into a unique, new song can be. If an AI grabs a couple of words from an existing work, is that enough to qualify as copyright? And even then... if it DOES... then we already have laws to take care of that. If you don't like AI writing and don't want to use it, that's awesome. If you like AI writing and want to use it, also awesome. There's no reason those two things can't coexist. This loops me back to an earlier argument. How is that any different than my human brain reading your work, "training" my mind, and then writing something similar? It seems to me it's not better or worse for an AI to do exactly that. We are ALL "trained" by existing works, unless you meant to tell me that you have lived in a vacuum and every single thought you put into writing is 100% original and has had absolutely no influence from another work? And if you say that, you're lying. If I were to read a bunch of Lovecraft, and then write a novel in the style of Lovecraft, am I infringing on copyright? No, probably not. If I were to train an AI model with those same Lovecraft works and have it generate a novel in the style of Lovecraft, am I infringing on copyright? Realistically, also probably not. It was functionally the same action. I'm a hobbyist writer myself. Nothing serious, and very little even posted anywhere. I do it for fun. I love AI tools. Now on my own preference, I don't have it generate a whole work from prompts, but I do use it as something of a "writers room" to spitball ideas at. It's been immensely useful in that application.
The rabbit hole, I believe, begins and ends with using copyrighted works to train an AI. At that point, it doesn't matter if it's a little chunk, or a big one. The material is in there. That's why the EU passed a law forcing engines to show what works they use. And that's also why those AI companies have fought so hard against it. Because part of that "training", at least for me, is knowing what's already out there so I don't do the same thing. And when a human writes a story, they bring into it the sum total of their entire existence, which AI can not do. That's the secret sauce right there. AI doesn't experience anything. AI doesn't have emotion. AI can't interpret anything. Take "The Orville", for instance. Clearly, a pastiche of Star Trek tropes and motifs, specifically 90's era Trek. And yet, it isn't a copyrght violation because it is certainly it's own unique entity. How? Because Seth McFarlane took what he knew about Trek, added in his own personal experiences, and made something new and different. Whereas on the other hand, if you told AI to create a "humorous Star Trek show", what it would give you would be a hodgepodge of references and situations that it was programmed to categorize as "funny". I've never said that. No writer ever does. No, because Lovecraft is in the public domain. If you want to train AI on public-domain works, go right ahead. There's nothing wrong with using AI for writing prompts. But, to paraphrase Picard from First Contact, "They won't stay on [writing prompts]." Amazon's been deluged with self-published AI dreck. The writer's strike had to fight tooth and nail to keep Hollywood from pushing them out in favor of AI-written screenplays. We can talk about whether it CAN be done, but at the end of the day you have to ask if you SHOULD. Do we, as a species, really want to farm out our creativity to AI?
I was hoping more of a "spirit of the question" answer. Replace Lovecraft with a currently copyrighted author. What is the difference between you training your human mind with x-author and training an AI with x-author? I think we should let people decide for themselves, in the most direct way possible... with their money. If AI generate work is so bad, it will die naturally. If people enjoy it, perhaps even more than human-created work? So be it. Art is art. I don't actually care who, or what, created it.
Asked and answered, counselor, to borrow a legal phrase. I think this quote sums it up quite well. Which is the ultimate source of the debate. To creators, this is an anathema. It's like asking an artist to do a work "for free" because we don't value the art or the process. To a consumer, there is little thought behind the actual process of making art. The words on the page don't automatically reflect what is done to get there. My favorite authors are ones that also write up their research and process and show me the process. I've seen my wife write and research and work to make her stories make sense for their world. AI, ultimately, doesn't think. But, sadly, I don't know if consumers will respect that process.
Like I said, the difference is in the sentient component. AI can't create. It can't deviate. It can't innovate. It can only copy. Humans can. Well, if you feel that way, I can't really argue with you. You dont see it as distressing that we'd have computers spitting out algorithm-derived remixes of existing works instead of creating new things. It's like trying to convince someone it's a bad idea to tattoo your eyeballs when they're already in the waiting room.
I was speaking more in a copyright law sense. There seems to be functionally zero difference between a human learning works and an AI learning works. I think there is room for both. They are not mutually exclusive.
Here is the difference: A human is incapable of looking at a work in a vacuum. That is Lit Theory 101. Death of the Author and so on. AI is incapable of reader-response criticism. You can't feed an AI Moby Dick and ask it "What are the important themes in this work?" You can't ask the AI, "How does Ahab's obsession resonate with your own life experiences?" Another example: Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho, and Silence of the Lambs all take inspiration from the same source: Ed Gein. Yet all are wildly different. AI can't do that kind of creative extrapolation. As I type this, every person my daughter made friends with at University is transferring out of art school due to the bleak outlook of art careers in the face of AI art. No, they can not co-exist.
You are so missing the point. Gaming is a bad example to try to convince me. I'm a gamer and belong to multiple gaming forums. Several of my ongoing NaNo projects are fanfic based on games. My first NaNo win was a novelization of the Fighting Fantasy gamebook Caverns of the Snow Witch. No, I didn't create most of the characters, nor did I create the setting. But I took the stats I rolled up and created a character from that and went beyond how most people play FF. For me it's part of a much larger world than even Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone intended. Am I violating their copyright? They're certainly entitled to think so, but the fact is that I've never actually posted that story anywhere. It was written in November 2016 and to this day it's remained on my computer. But I had the immense satisfaction of finally succeeding - after 9 years of trying and failing - at passing that 50,000-word mark (the story is actually a bit over 60,000 words). One of my current projects is based on the computer game King's Heir: Rise to the Throne. That's the one I worked on in 2018, that ended up with my having that 8000+-word marathon on the last day, and on December 1 when most NaNo participants just rest, I kept going. I've kept going ever since then, expanding the setting, creating new characters, and doing a massive amount of worldbuilding. The game devs could have done that if they'd wanted to, but I suppose the game wasn't profitable enough. No matter; as with any fandom that inspires fanfic, what TPTB don't provide, fans will. There were a few details in that game that would have made a hell of a good sequel and even a prequel. The devs may have thought of using them if the sales had warranted additional games, or maybe to them it was a throwaway detail they overlooked. For me, it's a goldmine of ideas to work with, and I daresay that my version of this story is probably very different from how another person would approach it. As Cr0sis21 points out, writers bring their own emotions and experiences to a story. I've had life experiences that mean I approach historical fantasy in different ways than a lot of other people would approach it. But the point is that it's how I approach it. Not some computer program pretending to be human. Put it this way. One of my favorite TOS tie-in authors is Greg Cox. I want to read the books he writes, not what some AI spits out when attempting to mimic his style. Trying to copyright individual musical notes is like trying to copyright individual letters of the alphabet. And speaking of copyright and songs... the first time I heard the melody that Picard plays on his Ressikan flute in the TNG episodes where it's referenced, I nearly fell off my chair laughing. That melody is such an obvious ripoff of "The Skye Boat Song" that it isn't remotely plausible that whoever came up with the idea for that episode could have composed it from scratch. They got away with it because that song is in the public domain in the U.S. Note that I'm not saying it's an unpleasant melody; it's quite lovely. But it's also not original enough to convince me that it wasn't heavily "borrowed." So far we've been talking about fiction. But suppose someone has an AI spit out a medical textbook that for some reason latches onto some of the wacky "remedies" that some very ignorant people dreamed up to cure or prevent Covid? Suppose someone buys that AI-generated book and believes some of the misinformation and acts on it (doesn't have to be Covid specifically; any medical issue that is subject to having misinformation spread about it)? Now you're getting into the realm of putting people's lives at risk. Even just the widespread nonsense spread by anti-vaxxers is enough to put lives at risk, and there's probably a lot of it being peddled on Amazon as I type. One difference is that you know you're not supposed to copy other people's work and pass it off as your own. An AI doesn't know this, and doesn't care. And I daresay the programmers don't care either. Prompts are one thing. There are a lot of them on Pinterest, and I've jotted a few of them down because they sounded interesting. I have no idea if a human came up with them or if an AI did. But the fact is that if I use them, the story will have been written by ME. Not an AI. My own interpretations and life experiences will be going into them. An AI has none of that. And circling back to music for a moment... do you take some of your inspiration from music? My go-to for inspiration includes Enya, Will Millar, and some of the music in the games I've played have inspired scenes and chapters and even character creation just because the music makes me envision people dancing, and then individual dancers, and those individuals need names and next thing you know, a new character is born. And that came from a medieval-era jig in a solitaire game. I got into a conversation with one of the people who create the Jewel Match Solitaire/Match-3 games. They had some general questions about what we (on that particular gaming forum) liked about the games. I told them that the castles that we build with the gems earned by solving the puzzles inspire me to write stories. Specifically, stories that take place in another gaming company's setting. And y'know what? They weren't upset. They were pleased that their games inspired me, because it's a good indicator that I'm going to keep buying their games because there can never be enough castles. I keep asking them to please have a space setting for one of their games, because I want to see castles on exotic planets or in orbit in space with cute little owls wearing space suits (they have a lot of owl sounds as part of the ambience). No luck so far. But I keep hoping the idea will strike someone there as a doable one. I think it also helps that I'm always upfront about where my inspiration comes from. A few years ago I ran part of a first draft past a friend to get some feedback. She said it reminded her of Game of Thrones, and I thought, omg, I hope she doesn't think I plagiarized it - the fact is, I've never watched GoT, nor have I read the novels. And now that I know that an idea or two of mine resemble one or two of GRRM's ideas, I can never watch that show or read the books even if I should want to. I value my story too much to risk anything sneaking into it, either deliberately or subconsciously (she did play the game this is based on and said that wasn't what reminded her of GoT). Absolutely not, or at least we shouldn't. Creativity is a huge part of our evolution as a species, and if we give that up, we're screwed. I'm reminded of an old argument on my Civilization forum about cursive writing. I'm old enough that some of the people on that forum could be my grandchildren if I'd ever had any, and it's ingly frustrating to be confronted with people who don't see any point in learning how to pick up a pen and actually write. They can't fathom a world where it's a necessary skill because they were born in a time when computers were everywhere, having no electricity is a temporary inconvenience, and batteries are so plentiful that they seem to grow on trees. And if they don't learn to write it, they also won't learn to read it. There's an immense amount of information that only exists in handwritten form. Our current society seems to be deliberately giving up the ability to deal with it because it's "hard" or "inconvenient." I've done some of my NaNo sessions in longhand, on looseleaf. It takes four times as long to physically write 1667 words/day as it does to type those words, and yes, it's physically painful (thanks, arthritis and fibromyalgia). But I've been in a situation where I nearly lost my ability to write due to medical issues, and when faced with the possibility of not being able to write, I suddenly felt that I would only be semi-literate if I couldn't write. So I picked up a pencil and an old crossword puzzle book and retrained myself to print. It took months and hurt, and there are still bad days when even my printing resembles something a 6-year-old would turn out, but the creative abilities I worked hard to learn are not going to be given up. Same with writing and music (I play the organ and recorder and have composed) and needlework (3-D needlepoint and cross stitch). When I sew, it's by hand, not by machine. If I color a picture, I dig out my pencil crayons, pens, or wax crayons. AI need not apply. This lack of respect is why I've never published my original needlepoint patterns. People don't see the hours, days, and weeks taken to figure this stuff out, stitch samples, rip it out when things go wrong, figure out how to make it come out right, and try again and again. I used to have a home crafting business, and took commissions. People would ask for some item and we'd talk about what their ideas were and I'd tell them what I could realistically do with the materials I had available to work with and if I had the tools to make it work, and we'd get things sorted out. I'd start with a sketch, and then move to graph paper. To this day there are things I've made where the only pattern in existence is a piece of graph paper and the pattern is in pencil. And over the years I developed my own stitching style so I can tell the difference between something I made and something someone else made even if we used the same commercial pattern. It was rather funny one day when a friend of my grandmother showed me a coaster someone had given her. She said, "I thought this was nice and maybe you could copy the pattern for your sales." I took one look at it and started to laugh - I don't know how she got that coaster, but can only assume that someone bought a set from me at the craft fair a few months previously and gave one to each of several friends. I told her that I didn't have to copy that pattern - I'd created it.
I fail to see why AI stories existing in any way has an effect on how much enjoyment you derive from crafting your own. It's absolutely irrelevant. And that's ok. The answer is... then don't read it. Kind of the point, yes. At point is something copyrighted? I'm going to make up a completely original work right now... "The big black scorpion attacked the flying blue ant in a battle over the last morsel of food left in a dying world otherwise populated by living, non-edible golems of orange marmalade." As far as I know, nobody has ever written that before, it's a unique thought and by virtue of it being in the world, I have a copyright on it now. How much, or how little, would one need to reproduce for it to be in violation of my copyright? How is that any different than a human writing a book of misinformation? It's only bad when AI does it? Given the need for copyright law, humans often don't care either... My real issue is alot of the arguments against boil down to "I don't like AI generated stuff". That's ok. There's alot of stuff I don't like. I don't consume it. If you don't like AI generated works, don't consume them.
A better question is how do we protect authors now? What copyright protections extend if AI pulls from Greg Cox's works, as example? That's why transparency is so important. Are we going to put labels on AI generated work now? Is that required by law or should be? It's easy to say "Well, don't buy AI work." But, how should this be labeled? At what point is it fully AI generated? 50% 75%? Is ghost writing AI then edited by a human still AI work?
You're missing the point Every. Single. Time. You just can't wrap your mind around the fact that AI-generated stuff that blatantly copies already-published material created by humans is harmful both in terms of finances and in what it's doing to our very society. You're in favor of handing over millennia of human creativity to a machine that's been programmed to mimic human creativity while having no creativity of its own. Again, you just don't get it. Honestly, you will never have to worry about any human stealing it. It's awful. The point is that it's misinformation that somebody with zero scruples has decided to peddle for whatever reason (usually to make a profit) and to hell with the possible consequences.