GRAFTON, Mass. (AP) — When two octogenarian friends named Nick discovered that ChatGPT could steal and reuse a lifetime of their work, they enlisted the help of a son-in-law to sue the companies behind the project. artificial intelligence chatbot.
Veteran journalists Nicholas Gage, 84, and Nicholas Basbanes, 81, who live next door to each other in the same Massachusetts town, have each devoted decades to reporting, writing and authoring books.
Gage chronicled her family’s tragic story and her quest for the truth about her mother’s death in a best-selling autobiography that led to John Malkovich casting her in the 1985 film “Eleni.” Basbanes turned her skills as a newspaper reporter into writing popular books about literary culture.
Basbanes was the first of the duo to try to manipulate AI chatbots, finding them impressive but prone to lies and lack of attribution. The friends complained and filed their lawsuit earlier this year, seeking to represent a class of writers whose copyrighted works they say “have been systematically stolen by” OpenAI and its commercial partner Microsoft.
“It’s an armed 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, as the two men browsed Gage’s book-filled shelves. “We worked too hard on those volumes.”
Their lawsuit is now part of a larger class-action case brought by household names including John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and “Game of Thrones” novelist George R.R. Martin; and it’s being prosecuted by the same New York federal judge who is hearing similar copyright claims from media outlets including The New York TimesChicago Tribune and Mother Jones.
What ties all of these cases together is the claim that OpenAI — with the help of Microsoft’s money and computing power — ingested massive amounts of human writing to “train” AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text, without obtaining permission from or compensating the people who wrote the original works.
“If you can get it for free, why pay for it?” Gage said. “But it’s deeply unfair and very damaging to the written word.”
OpenAI and Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment this week, but have disputed the allegations in court and in public. Other AI companies have also faced legal challenges, not just from authors but from their peers. visual artists, music labels and other creators who claim that generative AI profits were built on diversions.
Microsoft AI Division General Manager Mustafa Suleyman defended AI industry practices At last month’s Aspen Ideas festival, he expressed the theory that training AI systems on content already on the open internet is protected by the “fair use” doctrine of U.S. copyright law.
“Since the 1990s, the social contract that governs this content is that it’s fair use,” Suleyman said. “Anyone can copy it, recreate it, reproduce it. It’s freeware, in a way.”
Suleyman said it’s more of a “gray area” in situations where some news outlets and others have explicitly said they don’t want tech companies to “suppress” content from their websites. “I think that’s going to be settled in court,” he said.
The cases are still in the discovery phase and are expected to drag on until 2025. In the meantime, some who feel their profession is threatened by AI business practices have tried to strike private deals for tech companies to pay a fee to license their records. Others are fighting back.
“It took someone going out and interviewing real people in the real world and doing real research by studying documents and then synthesizing them and finding a way to make them clear and simple,” said Frank Pine, editor in chief of MediaNews Group, publisher of dozens of newspapers including the Denver Post, the Orange County Register and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The newspaper chain filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April.
“This is all real work, and it’s work that AI can’t do,” Pine said. “An AI application is never going to leave the office and go to a city where there’s a fire and cover that fire.”
Deemed too similar to the lawsuits filed late last year, the Massachusetts duo’s January complaint was folded into a consolidated case brought by other nonfiction authors as well as fiction authors represented by the Authors Guild. That means Gage and Basbanes likely won’t be witnesses in any upcoming trial in Manhattan federal court. But in the twilight of their careers, they felt it was important to take a stand for the future of their art.
Gage fled Greece at age 9, haunted by the massacre of his mother in 1948 during the Civil War. He joined his father in Worcester, Massachusetts, not far from where he lives today. And with the help of a teacher, he began writing and built a reputation as a dogged investigative journalist, investigating organized crime and political corruption for The New York Times and other newspapers.
Basbanes, a Greek-American journalist, had heard of and admired the “star reporter” when he received a surprise phone call at his office at the Worcester Evening Gazette in the early 1970s. The voice asked for Mr. Basbanes, using the Greek way of pronouncing the name.
“You were like a talent scout,” Basbanes said. “We struck up a friendship. I mean, I’ve known him longer than my wife, and we’ve been married 49 years.”
Basbanes didn’t mine his own history the way Gage did, but he says it can take days to write a good paragraph and confirm all the facts in it. It took him years of research and trips to archives and auction houses to write his 1995 book “A Gentle Madness” about the art of book collecting from ancient Egypt to modern times.
“I love that ‘A Gentle Madness’ is in about 1,400 libraries,” Basbanes said. “That’s what a writer wants: to be read. But you also write to make a living, to feed your family, to make a living. And as long as it’s part of your intellectual property, you deserve to be fairly compensated for your efforts.”
Gage took a huge professional risk when he quit his job at the Times and went $160,000 into debt to find out who was responsible for his mother’s death.
“I found everyone who was in the village when my mother was killed,” he said. “They were scattered all over Eastern Europe. It cost me a lot of money and time. I had no guarantee that I would get the money back. But when you get involved in something as important as my mother’s story, the risks are enormous, the efforts are enormous.”
In other words, ChatGPT couldn’t do that. But what worries Gage is that ChatGPT could make it harder for others to do that.
“Publishing is going to disappear. Newspapers are going to disappear. Talented young people are not going to get into writing,” Gage said. “I’m 84. I don’t know if this issue will be resolved while I’m still here. But it’s important that we find a solution.”
————-
The Associated Press and OpenAI have a license and technology agreement which allows OpenAI to access part of AP’s text archives.