The world of professional writing is facing new challenges in the age of artificial intelligence and chatbots, challenges that are beginning to show up in publishing contracts. At question is whether an author or screenwriter should be free to submit AI-generated material as their own and, if so, what if any rights to the finished product should the AI or its owners have?
The Writers Guild of America (WGA), whose members are currently on strike against major Hollywood TV and movie studios, are tackling the question of chatbots in their contract negotiations. The WGA wants writers to have the freedom to use generative AI, but does not want the product of that AI to be considered “source material”, such as a novel, story or magazine article a screenplay may be based on.
The key difference here is that the owners or authors of “source material” must be compensated for their work. Not surprisingly, the WGA wants its writers to have the best of both worlds here, to be able to use the rich functionality of chatbot AI without sharing residuals with the tool.
And it’s not just Hollywood where the specter of AI-generated text is causing changes in how contracts are constructed. People who I have spoken with in publishing are grudgingly acknowledging that some kind of compromise has to be reached allowing authors to use AI in delivering their books.
And in the case of book publishing, the concerns about AI cut both ways. In March, the Author’s Guild called for new book contacts going forward to allow writers to opt out of having their work used to train generative AI. That is to say, they could refuse to have their words added to the almost limitless inputs that AI uses to produce text.
From the consumer’s perspective the question of whether text was written by an author or generated by a chatbot may well depend on the nature of the text in question. If you are reading a book about projects to do around the house, it may not matter where the exact phrasing came from, but if you’re reading the work of a public intellectual, you may want their actual thoughts and ideas, not the aggregation of inputs.
In other areas of writing such as history, there is reasonable concern that ideological preferences could be enforced by AI when describing the past. For example, in how subjects like Confederate generals Robert E Lee or Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson are treated, will AI tend towards a presentist approach decrying the men as supporters of slavery, or will it tend toward a more traditional, neutral approach to their military careers?
Ultimately, as they say, the proof is in the pudding, or in this case the final work. What isn’t going to change, regardless of whether AI is used or not, is the creation of a script, book or text that the authors must negotiate with their editors and publishers. In a very real sense, any text created by AI is by its very nature a rough draft subject to correction.
It is worth noting, in all of this, that we may be putting the cart before the horse since we really do not know if AI is even capable of producing a funny and successful romantic comedy or a page-turning mystery novel.
In all likelihood, every industry that relies on creative writing will find its own set of rules and standards particular to its needs. But it’s worth examining the broader question of just what intellectual property is in the age of AI.
Heretofore, it has been somewhat self-evident that words produced by a human mind are the sole property of those who thought them. This was true even if a thesaurus was used for word choice, but what does it mean if instead of replacing a word, this AI thesaurus can replace paragraphs, pages or even whole works?
It was billionaire Mark Cuban who famously predicted that AI would make computer engineering degrees less valuable, but he didn’t say anything about contract law. That little corner of the legal industry should see a boom as we tease out the ownership issues surrounding generative AI.
In this process the reader should not be left out of the equation. Do we have a right to know if something we read is generated by AI or the product of a human mind? For all you know this column was created by a chatbot, or was it? In the not too distant future we may have no idea at all.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact the US Commerce Department and demand that Big Tech developers of artificial intelligence technologies mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. The official comment period on AI Accountability Policy Request for Comment ends 06/12/2023, but this is just the beginning of our fight to preserve American freedom.
