Artificial Intelligence Ripoff
"Artificial Intelligence is shamelessly ripping off authors and publishers. Some are starting to fight back."
Tom Sancton
We are at the dawning of the age of Artificial Intelligence.
I liken this moment to that period 30 years ago when Netscape was new, when AOL was cutting edge, and when internet access came from a dial-up connection. Artificial Intelligence is still new enough that we may be able to shape its use so that it is a tremendous benefit to humankind. If we don't, it may become a monster than destroys us.
Tom Sancton is an early victim of AI. He shows what can go very wrong. He is a college classmate, and a graduate of Harvard and Oxford. He spent two decades as a writer and correspondent for TIME and is the author of nine works of fiction and nonfiction. He has taught writing at the American University of Paris and Tulane University. He currently lives in France.
Guest Post by Tom Sancton
If you look up my 2017 nonfiction book The Bettencourt Affair on Amazon, you will find another “book” listed right under it: “Summary of Tom Sancton’s Bettencourt Affair.”
I checked it out and saw that it was a 50-page, chapter-by-chapter resumé of my book, done by AI, and published by an outfit nobody ever heard of called Everest Media. It sells for $3.99. It obviously has no literary merit, but it paraphrases and summarizes the results of my five years of reporting and research and copies my structure.
Whoever published it used my copyrighted work without permission or recompense to create what in fact is a competing product. Anybody who just wants to get a quick fix on this story of the world’s richest woman and the boyfriend who took her for a billion dollars can buy this cheap summary instead of my book. (BTW, the Bettencourt story is currently featured on Netflix under the title “The Billionaire, the Butler, and the Boyfriend.”) I brought the AI ripoff to the attention of my agent and publisher and was told that there was not much we could do unless the summary lifted passages verbatim from my book, which it apparently did not.
But if I have no clear recourse, others are taking legal action. My son Julian Sancton, author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Voyage into the Antarctic Night, has become the lead plaintiff in a class action suit against Open AI and Microsoft, claiming they used his book without permission or recompense to train their systems. The suit has since been joined by dozens of other nonfiction authors. A similar suit on behalf of fiction authors, including Jonathan Franzen and John Grisham, has also been filed. Recently, the New York Times filed suit against Open AI and Microsoft, claiming they sucked up millions of its copyrighted articles to train their systems and used the Times’ reporting to compete with the Gray Lady as a source of online news.
What will come of these legal actions, apart from perhaps winning some kind of monetary settlement? Are Open AI, Microsoft and other AI companies really likely to change their ways? Perhaps the horse is already out of the barn and all creative people — authors, journalists, screenwriters, actors, musicians, and artists — will inevitably have their work ripped off, repackaged, and regurgitated in countless ways by AI systems that no one really controls or regulates.
But that pessimistic view, which I originally tended to share, may not tell the final story. Commenting on the social network formerly known as Twitter, my former Time Magazine colleague Walter Isaacson writes: “These will be the most important cases for journalism and publishing in our lifetime. If AI companies have to cut deals with news organizations and publishers to license their content feeds for use as AI training data, that could save local journalism as well as magazines and publishing. It would provide a business model that supports people who report things, and it would place a financial premium on accurate, high-value journalism. AI systems will compete for which has the most valuable, reliable training data. Kudos to Axel Springer, Mathias Döpfner, and the AP for leading the way and the New York Times for making the legal case.”