What Does AI Mean for Authors?

In case you missed it, read why I think AI will not destroy publishing here.

What I didn’t touch on in last week’s post was AI and authors. To put it bluntly, authors are PISSED about how most current AI tools work (including me).

Because: AI “learns” using creative work without permission (or payment).

Comedian, actress, and author Sarah Silverman — along with novelists Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey — are suing Open AI (the creators of ChatGPT) and Meta Platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) for violation of intellectual property law.

Essentially — as reported in Vulture — “OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s artificial-intelligence projects rely on the mass trawling of books to learn language and generate text, the suits say. Silverman’s suit contends that these AI projects didn’t secure her and other authors’ permission for using their works before inhaling them, violating intellectual-property law. They also claim that these AI systems gained access to these books via spurious means, using libraries of pirated texts — or as the suits’ co-attorney Matthew Butterick puts it to Vulture, ‘Creators’ work has been vacuumed up by these companies without consent, without credit, without compensation, and that’s not legal.’”