It has almost been a year since ChatGPT, the generative AI tool from OpenAI, became available to the public. Within this year, the chatbot has undergone many developments, such as analysing images or having a voice conversation, but with these developments ethical and intellectual property issues also arise. For instance, recently a group of seventeen authors has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infringement.
Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer (ChatGPT) is trained with a combination of reinforcement learning algorithms and around 150 billion parameters of human input (Dowling & Lucey, 2023) and can therefore interact with users in a human-like way. And so, the answers given by the chatbot are based on millions of different texts, among which also the books of these writers. Users of ChatGPT have written texts which resemble those of famous authors. For instance, a fan of the book series ‘A song of ice and fire’ used ChatGPT to write the unreleased last parts of the book series in the authors’ writing style.
The lawsuit will take place in New York and is the initiative of the American writers’ association ‘Authors Guild’. These authors, among whom Jason Grisham and George R. R. Martin, have filed a lawsuit as it is their opinion that although the texts are not being sold by the fan, their writing style and book characters are being ‘stolen’. Therefore, they argue that their livelihoods are at risk since their texts are being used without payment (NOS, 2023).
The same phenomenon is also happening in the world of art. AI technology such as Dall-E or Midjourney are fed with data to detect the patterns of images. When users create new images, they still contain the style of the original work. This again raises questions regarding intellectual property (Shi, 2023). However, to avoid issues like these, Getty Images for example, has invented an AI tool that is trained with royalty-free photos from their image database. Users can now create new images without infringing copyrights (NU.nl, 2023).
What are your thoughts about this? Would you consider this plagiarism like the Authors Guild does or would you consider it a new piece of work?
References:
Dowling, M., & Lucey, B. M. (2023). ChatGPT for (Finance) research: The Bananarama Conjecture. Finance Research Letters, 53, 103662. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.frl.2023.103662
NOS. (2023, September 21). Amerikaanse schrijvers, onder wie John Grisham, klagen maker van ChatGPT aan. NOS. https://nos.nl/artikel/2491247-amerikaanse-schrijvers-onder-wie-john-grisham-klagen-maker-van-chatgpt-aan
NU.nl. (2023, September 26). Je kunt straks zelf rechtenvrije plaatjes maken met AI-tool van Getty Images. NU.nl. https://www.nu.nl/tech/6282593/je-kunt-straks-zelf-rechtenvrije-plaatjes-maken-met-ai-tool-van-getty-images.html
Shi. (2023, July 17). Paint, Pixels, and Plagiarism: The Rise of Generative AI and the. . . Towards AI. https://towardsai.net/p/machine-learning/paint-pixels-and-plagiarism-the-rise-of-generative-ai-and-the-uncertain-future-of-art
Very interesting posts! I think this is currently one of the biggest issues the generative AI tools are experiencing. I wonder how the legislation will develop around issues like this, it is likely that this case will set the precedent for how generative AI copyright will be handled in court. Being inspired by a work is normally not something that you are able to someone for, but this seems very different because of the scale and potential for abuse.
I doubt the livelihood of these writers is actually being threatened in a significant way, because the writing by AI does tend to be inferior, and they would not be able to actually use the name of the author of which they are using the style.