Has AI Made Copyrights Obsolete?

 

Guest Post by Jennifer Sadera

My husband has a cool job. He creates unique spaces for museum exhibits in New York City. Among my favorite of his projects over the years are: The Costume Institute and Karl Lagerfeld exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the live-plant-wall project in the main entrance at Lincoln Center; the Tiffany Gallery in New York Historical Society; and the Anne Frank exhibit at Center for Jewish History. A bonus for me: attending the openings of all these exhibits.

At these events I meet some of New York’s movers and shakers and conversations are usually interesting. Inevitably, discussion pivots to what I do. When I explain I’m an author, most people are intrigued and ask a lot of questions, but every so often people declare that they, too, could write a book. At this point I paste on a smile and try to look interested as the person before me launches into a fifteen-minute oral dissertation of the book’s premise, plotline, characters, and theme. When I ask them how far along they are in the writing process, the answer is usually a head shake and admission that they haven’t actually begun writing.

This always makes me grit my teeth. Honestly, if you tell me you’re a lawyer, a doctor, an exterminator, or nearly any other job on the planet, it’s highly unlikely I will pipe in with, “Oh, I could do that.” I could not do those jobs because I am a writer. That is my job, and it’s not as easy as it looks. Trust me. I started writing at age eight. My dad was my first editor and critic (thankfully he was not critical!), which gave me the curiosity to learn all that I could about writing. After college, I worked on the staffs of Woman’s World, Beauty, and Redbook magazines. When both my children were diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, and I needed to be near them to manage their condition, I ditched New York City and began a freelance writing business in my home. I can trace the evolution of my writing style through the hundreds of clips from the magazines, newspapers, and other periodicals I contributed to over many years. And still, I was offered my first contract by a traditional publisher only after writing six books over 12 years. And I’m one of the lucky ones.

People know this. Powerful people like Mark Zuckerberg. He doesn’t have time (and probably not the talent since he is not a writer) to create the millions of books he needs to train AI and give his company, Meta, an advantage over the competition. But this is apparently no problem. He allegedly took our books without offering compensation or even asking for permission, wiped the copyrights, and has turned the world’s best writers into teachers for their replacements.

How can this be, you may wonder. Copyrights protect a writer’s intellectual property . . . until a trillion-dollar company decides to disregard laws. It can afford to. As intimated in a recent article in the Atlantic, it’s cheaper to compensate for the pirated intellectual property of more than 7 million writers than fall behind in the worldwide AI race. Strange set of priorities, don’t you think? Who is he protecting? Certainly, not the right to create.

There’s a saying that those who create don’t destroy, but what about those who steal creations? I assert that destruction of artists and livelihoods—already a struggle—can be the only outcome. He’s literally stealing from those who can least afford it. There’s a reason most of us creatives fall into the “struggling artist” category. 

The Authors Guild is on top of this issue with a class-action lawsuit underway. If you think your writing was pirated, you can search the Library Genesis database (www.libgen.is/fiction), which lists all books from “publicly available internet sources.” Simply type your name into their search bar. If your book comes up, as mine did, your work has been stolen for the use of training AI.

Let’s face it, artists of all types—writers, photographers, and painters to name a few—are the low-hanging fruit in this situation. Our work is easy to access and ripe for the picking if the plunderer can afford to disregard the law and settle their debts at a later time—once they rake in the trillions from their AI victory. We are the David to Zuckerberg’s Goliath. But we know how that battle ended, don’t we? Reach out to the Authors Guild and find out what action you can take to keep our collective intellectual property protected.

But for now, I’d love to hear different perspectives. What do you think, is there an upside to using AI in this capacity? How might AI help our writing community?

Jennifer Sadera is the author of the recently released domestic suspense I KNOW SHE WAS THERE (CamCat Books). Her writing has earned her multiple awards at Atlanta Writers conferences and a fellowship at Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. A former staffer on Woman’s World and Redbook magazines, she now contributes to ITW’s The Big Thrill and is a finalist for Chronogram  magazine’s top author of the Hudson Valley, New York, where she lives. She is a proud member of ITW, MWA, and SINC.