Reporting from a webinar about artificial intelligence and authors.
On Wednesday, April 26th, I attended a webinar hosted by the national authors association here in Canada, about AI and authors. Prior to the webinar, I tried a number of tasks using AI, specifically ChatGPT 3.5. For some reason, the mobile app version seemed to perform better than the web-based platform.
For those writing naturist fiction, ChatGPT has a lot of hang ups with regards to what words it will accept or reject. Nudity and its derivatives results in a rejection response. However, once one finds a work around, the software has no issue with using the word nude, nudity, naturism, naked, etc., in its responses.
Here is what I learned:
- AI is not going away.
- AI has no agenda other than whatever the creators of various AI systems encode, consciously or unconsciously.
- AI language models learn from what is already in print [digital print]
- AI language models will improve as they learn from additional input which may be either from users or from scrubbing the Internet
So what does this really mean? Well, honestly, it means that likely anything I have written, or anything you have written and published as eBooks, WILL be eventually copied and put into the language learning mix. Copyright WILL be ignored 100%.
Sad to say that one participant in the group was glad that this was the case as he then rationalised that his work would be likely used by others for generations to come – copyright be damned.
As for copyright protection, no government exists that is willing to take on the conglomerates. Without AI chat programs, there is already very little honouring of copyright. Education institutes copy at will, from any book, rationalising that schools, universities, and colleges can’t afford to pay royalties. They call it fair use.
EBooks are pirated unceasingly by more and more platforms as are music, photos, and videos – and then sold without needing to pay royalties to the creators. I am sad to say that the picture looks glum.
Yet, I doubt that any of us will stop writing. It’s in our blood. Likely the market will shrink for us, but our work will be read. In the future, especially when we aren’t around to know what’s going on, we may even become “classics.”
Ugh! Sorry to rain on the parade.
“Wow. Look at that. It was written by a real person.”
Yes, it’s sad and yes, it’s inevitable. But we will, indeed, keep writing. We’re better than AI and we’ll continue to prove it – if only to ourselves.
What about plagiarism and the legal ramifications
I am convinced they will ‘fix’ that in the small print of their EULA, hidden so deep no one can find that.