GRAFTON, Mass. (AP) – When two octogenarians named Nick discovered that ChatGPT could steal and reuse a lifetime of their work, they tapped a groom to sue the companies behind the artificial intelligence chatbot.
Veteran journalists Nicholas Gage84, and Nicholas Basbanes, 81, who live near each other in the same Massachusetts town, each devoted decades to reporting, writing and authoring books.
Gage poured his tragic family history and search for the truth about his mother’s death into a best-selling memoir that led John Malkovich to play him in the 1985 film Eleni. Basbanes passed on his skills as a reporter daily newspapers in writing widely read books on literary culture.
Basbanes was the first of the pair to try their hand at AI chatbots, finding them impressive but prone to lies and a lack of attributes. The friends cheered and filed their lawsuit earlier this year, seeking to represent a class of writers whose copyrighted work they claim has been “systematically stolen by” OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft.
“It’s highway robbery,” Gage said in an interview in his office near the 18th-century farmhouse where he lives in central Massachusetts.
“That’s it,” Basbanes added, as the two men looked at Gage’s bookshelves. “We’ve worked hard on these tomes.”
Now their lawsuit has been folded into a broader case seeking class-action status led by household names such as John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and “Game of Thrones” novelist George RR Martin; and proceedings under the same New York federal judge, which is hearing similar copyright claims from media outlets such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Mother Jones.
What ties all the cases together is the claim that OpenAI — with the help of Microsoft’s money and computing power — ingested large amounts of human writing to “train” AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text, without taking permit or compensate the people who wrote. original works.
“If they can get it for nothing, why pay for it?” Gage said. “But it is extremely unfair and very damaging to the written word.”
OpenAI and Microsoft did not return requests for comment this week, but have fought the allegations in court and in public. So have other AI companies facing legal challenges not just from writers, but from visual artists, music labels, and other creators who claim that AI-generating profits are built on appropriation.
Chief executive of Microsoft’s AI division, Mustafa Sulejmandefended the AI industry’s practices at last month’s Aspen Ideas Festival, theorizing that training AI systems on content that is already on the open Internet is protected by the “fair use” doctrine of US laws to copyright.
“The social contract of that content since the ’90s has been that it’s fair use,” Sulejman said. “Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. This has been free, if you will.”
Suleyman said it was more of a “gray area” in situations where some news organizations and others have explicitly said they don’t want tech companies to “delete” content from their websites. “I think this will work through the courts,” he said.
The cases are still in the discovery phase and are scheduled to drag on into 2025. Meanwhile, some who believe their professions are threatened by AI business practices have tried to secure private deals to make tech companies pay a fee to license their archives. Others are struggling.
“One had to go out and interview real people in the real world and do real research by looking at documents and then synthesizing those documents and finding a way to render them in clear, simple prose,” said Frank Pine, executive editor of MediaNews Group, publisher of dozens of newspapers including the Denver Post, Orange County Register and St. Louis. Paul Pioneer Press. The newspaper chain sued OpenAI in April.
“All of this is real work, and it’s work that HE can’t do,” Pine said. “An AI application will never leave the office and go downtown where there’s a fire and cover that fire.”
Considered very similar to lawsuits filed late last year, the Massachusetts duo’s January complaint is included in a consolidated case brought by other nonfiction writers as well as fiction writers represented by the Association of Authors. That means Gage and Basbanes will not be witnesses in any future trials in Manhattan federal court. But in the twilight of their careers, they felt it was important to take a stand on the future of their craft.
Gage left Greece as a 9-year-old, haunted by the 1948 firing squad killing of his mother during the country’s civil war. He joined his father in Worcester, Massachusetts, not far from where he lives today. And at the urging of a teacher, he pursued writing and built a reputation as a determined investigative reporter digging up organized crime and political corruption for The New York Times and other newspapers.
Basbanes, as a Greek-American journalist, had heard and admired the elderly “hot reporter” when he received an unexpected phone call at his desk at Worcester’s Evening Gazette in the early 1970s. The voice asked for Mr. Basbanes, using the Greek manner of pronouncing the name.
“You were like a talent scout,” Basbanes said. “We have created a friendship. I mean, I’ve known him longer than I’ve known my wife, and we’ve been married for 49 years.”
Basbanes hasn’t mined his story like Gage, but he says it can sometimes take days to craft a great paragraph and confirm all the facts in it. It took him years of research and trips to archives and auction houses to write his 1995 book “A Gentle Madness” about the art of book collecting from ancient Egypt to modern times.
“I love that ‘A Gentle Madness’ is in about 1,400 libraries,” Basbanes said. “That’s what a writer strives for — to be read. But you also write to earn, to put food on the table, to support your family, to make a living. And as long as it’s your intellectual property, you deserve to be fairly compensated for your efforts.”
Gage took a huge professional risk when he quit his job at the Times and went $160,000 in debt to find out who was responsible for his mother’s death.
“I tracked down everyone who was in the village when my mother was killed,” he said. “And they were spread out all over Eastern Europe. So it cost a lot of money and a lot of time. I had no certainty that I would get that money back, but when you commit to something as important as my mother’s story, the risks are extraordinary, the efforts are extraordinary.
In other words, ChatGPT could not do this. But what worries Gage is that ChatGPT could make it harder for others to do so.
“Publishing will die. Newspapers will die. Talented young people won’t go to writing,” Gage said. “I am 84 years old. I don’t know if this will be resolved while I’m still around. But it is important to find a solution”.
————-
The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to a portion of AP’s text archives.