When two 80-year-old friends discovered that ChatGPT might be stealing and repurposing what they’d been doing during their working lives, they persuaded one of their sons-in-law to help them sue the companies behind the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.
Veteran journalists Nicholas Gage, 84, and Nicholas Busbanes, 81, who live near each other in the same town in Massachusetts, have devoted decades to reporting, writing in the media and creating books.
Gage turned his tragic family story 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 Elena.
Basbanes parlayed his skills as a daily newspaper reporter into writing widely read books on literary culture.
Basbanes had tried playing with AI chatbots before his friend, finding them impressive but prone to lying and not citing sources. The friends filed a lawsuit this year, alleging that OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft are among the authors whose copyrighted work they claim is “systematically stealing.”
“It’s highway robbery,” Gage said in an interview in his office next to the 18th-century farmhouse where he lives in central Massachusetts.
“That’s right,” Basbanes added, and with Gage’s bookshelves full of books he added, “We’ve been working too hard on all this to give up.”
Now their lawsuit is included in a broader class action case led by famous names such as John Grisham, Jodi Piccol and “Game of Thrones” novelist George RR Martin. The proceedings are being conducted before the same New York federal judge who is considering similar copyright claims by the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Mother Jones.
All of these cases are linked by the claim that OpenAI, with the help of Microsoft’s money and computing power, devoured vast amounts of writing to “train” AI chatbots to produce passages of text similar to those written by humans, without obtaining permission or compensating the people who wrote the original text. works.
“If they can get it for free, why pay?” Gage said. “It is extremely unfair and very harmful to the written word”.
OpenAI and Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment, but are fighting the allegations in court and in public. So other AI companies are facing legal challenges not only from writers, but also from artists, music publishers and others who claim that AI profits are built on the misappropriation of other people’s works.
The CEO of Microsoft’s AI Division, Mustafa Suleiman, defended the practice at last month’s Aspen Festival of Ideas on the theory that training AI systems on content already online is protected by the “fair use” doctrine of US copyright law.
Sulejman said that this is why this content “can be copied, recreated, reproduced by anyone for free”.
Suleiman said it is a “grey area” when some news organizations and others explicitly say they don’t want technology companies to download the content of their websites, but “I think the court will decide on that.”
Such cases are still in the discovery phase and are expected to extend to 2025. Some who feel their professions are threatened by the business practices of artificial intelligence have tried to win private contracts to force tech companies to pay licensing fees for their archives, and others are fighting back with lawsuits.
“Someone had to go and interview real people in the real world and do real research by looking at documents and then synthesize those documents and figure out a way to present them in clear and simple prose,” said Frank Pine, executive editor of the MediaNews Group. , publisher of dozens of newspapers, several of which sued OpenAI in April.
“It’s all real work that AI can’t do,” Pyne said.
Eighteen-year-olds Gage and Busbanes, in the twilight of their careers, felt it important to take a stand on the future of their craft.
Gage, a child refugee from Greece during the 1948 civil war, built a reputation as a determined investigative reporter digging into organized crime and political corruption, writing for The New York Times and other newspapers.
Basbanes, also a Greek-American journalist, said that he heard about Gage as a “hotshot reporter” and admired him in the 1970s, when it was Gage, as a “talent hunter”, who found him at the local newspaper where he worked. “We developed a friendship. I mean, I’ve known him longer than I’ve known my wife, and we’ve been married for 49 years,” Basbanes said.
Basbanes hasn’t worked on his stories as long as Gage, but he says it can sometimes take days to write just one great paragraph of text and confirm all the facts in it. It took him years of research, travel and digging through archives and auction houses to write his 1995 book, Gentle Madness, about the art of collecting books from ancient Egypt to modern times.
“I love of course that ‘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 make money, to put food on the table, to support your family, to live. And as long as it’s your intellectual property, you deserve to be fairly compensated for your efforts,” he said. .
Gage took a major professional risk when he quit his job at The New York Times and went $160.000 in debt to find out who was responsible for his mother’s 1948 death in Greece.
“I found everyone who was in the village when my mother was killed,” he said. “They were scattered all over Eastern Europe. So it cost a lot of money and time. But when you commit to something as important as the story of my mother, the risks are huge, the efforts are huge”.
In other words, ChatGPT couldn’t do it. But Gage is more concerned that ChatGPT could make it harder for others to do so.
“Publications are going to die. Newspapers are going to die. Young people with talent are not going to write,” Gage said. “I’m 84 years old. I don’t know if it will be solved while I’m still here. But it’s important to find a solution”.
The AP Agency adds at the end of the text that it has an agreement with OpenAI on licensing and technology that enables OpenAI access to part of AP’s text archive.
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Source: Two octogenarian journalists tried ChatGPT and then sued it to protect the written word
