I’ve addressed this issue before by saying I should attach a disclaimer to every blog entry: This document in no way represents the work of an artificial intelligence. Heck, it barely represents the work of a human intelligence.
Here’s the dilemma: Winston Cho reports online that authors are suing Meta and OpenAI for infringement of copyright because they used published works to train their AI. *
I understand the motivation for the suit. Who wants to know that in a potential infinite number of books written by a machine that his work has been copied without acknowledgement? But I also understand the motivation of the AI guys. What better way to give artificial intelligence a sense of the language than to expose it to more than a hundred thousand books, maybe a million books?
And I think to my own years of learning to write. In high school I tried translating a book in Virgil’s Aeneid in the writing style of Damon Runyon. Strange combo, right? But at the time it seemed like a creative approach even though I was mimicking Runyon. In college I adopted the writing styles of various authors, many from nineteenth-century nonfiction, those great essayists who went on and and on and… in paragraphs that today would be considered full novella.
Whatever this style is that you are currently reading, whether good or bad, it comes from my imitating many authors. Fortunately, all of them are currently dead, so I don’t fear a lawsuit for copyright infringement. Nevertheless, how I write, how I approach a topic is the culmination of many imitations.
AI won’t develop the skill to write well unless it sees what good writing looks like. It might also learn from bad writing. In imitation of either good or bad writing, however, AI needs to write with a disclaimer: I wrote this, but I didn’t use any phrases or words peculiar to a particular author without documentation. I will acknowledge that my style might be imitative of one author’s or of several authors’ styles and that my plots belong to a class of limited plots. If you don’t like this story, close the book.
As for my own creativity, I find it lies in juxtaposition, that joining of opposites and dissimilarities best exemplified by my translating Virgil in the Runyon style. And that leads to my advice to writers and speakers both human and artificial: See analogs that others don’t see. They lie in abundance in your experience.
*https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/authors-sue-meta-openai-class-action-1235588711/
Here’s the dilemma: Winston Cho reports online that authors are suing Meta and OpenAI for infringement of copyright because they used published works to train their AI. *
I understand the motivation for the suit. Who wants to know that in a potential infinite number of books written by a machine that his work has been copied without acknowledgement? But I also understand the motivation of the AI guys. What better way to give artificial intelligence a sense of the language than to expose it to more than a hundred thousand books, maybe a million books?
And I think to my own years of learning to write. In high school I tried translating a book in Virgil’s Aeneid in the writing style of Damon Runyon. Strange combo, right? But at the time it seemed like a creative approach even though I was mimicking Runyon. In college I adopted the writing styles of various authors, many from nineteenth-century nonfiction, those great essayists who went on and and on and… in paragraphs that today would be considered full novella.
Whatever this style is that you are currently reading, whether good or bad, it comes from my imitating many authors. Fortunately, all of them are currently dead, so I don’t fear a lawsuit for copyright infringement. Nevertheless, how I write, how I approach a topic is the culmination of many imitations.
AI won’t develop the skill to write well unless it sees what good writing looks like. It might also learn from bad writing. In imitation of either good or bad writing, however, AI needs to write with a disclaimer: I wrote this, but I didn’t use any phrases or words peculiar to a particular author without documentation. I will acknowledge that my style might be imitative of one author’s or of several authors’ styles and that my plots belong to a class of limited plots. If you don’t like this story, close the book.
As for my own creativity, I find it lies in juxtaposition, that joining of opposites and dissimilarities best exemplified by my translating Virgil in the Runyon style. And that leads to my advice to writers and speakers both human and artificial: See analogs that others don’t see. They lie in abundance in your experience.
*https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/authors-sue-meta-openai-class-action-1235588711/
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