AI is coming, regardless. And while AI applications will have a strong impact on manufacturing and production, they’re also going to affect so-called white-collar clerical and lower-level data-management, as well as routine computer coding.
Authors and artists won’t be exempt, either. Artists who do illustrations for books and other publications are already complaining, and at least some publications are refusing to use artwork solely or partly AI-generated.
As for authors, a number of lawsuits have been brought in California and New York courts against various AI companies for copyright infringement because the companies employed unauthorized copying of authors’ works to train their generative AI models.
The discussions around this appear muddled, at least to me. Intelligence has to “learn” in some fashion. I’d read more than a thousand SF books and all the stories in ANALOG (including some from the Astounding Science-Fiction era) for fifteen years before I ever thought about writing a story, let alone a novel. So have a great many other authors.
The problem I have with the way the AI companies approached this was that while I had to pay (or occasionally borrow from the local library) to read and learn, these companies used pirated copies and paid no one. Some have attempted to claim “fair use,” which is absurd, given that “fair use” case law doesn’t allow use of extended prose in any form.
So why shouldn’t the AI companies pay royalties to authors whose works aren’t in the public domain? Shakespeare doesn’t need the royalties, but living, breathing, and working authors need and deserve them.
Since none of these legal suits have yet come to trial (so far as I can tell), we’ll see what the courts have to say.
Of course, those lawsuits don’t address the fact that dialogue from movies and TV shows has been used by companies such as Apple and Anthropic to train AI systems.
I could be underestimating the potential of generative AI, but I doubt that it will ever produce truly great prose or poetry, or even well-written mid-list fiction, but I have no doubt that, in time, it will be able to churn out serviceable methodical fiction with little uniqueness.
As in many fields, we’ll have to see, but in the meantime, the AI companies have no business pirating current authors’ works in an effort to eventually replace them.
