Alex Reisner writes:

It took Ralph Ellison seven years to write Invisible Man. It took J. D. Salinger about 10 to write The Catcher in the Rye. J. K. Rowling spent at least five years on the first Harry Potter book. Writing with the hope of publishing is always a leap of faith. Will you finish the project? Will it find an audience?

Whether authors realize it or not, the gamble is justified to a great extent by copyright. Who would spend all that time and emotional energy writing a book if anyone could rip the thing off without consequence? This is the sentiment behind at least nine recent copyright-infringement lawsuits against companies that are using tens of thousands of copyrighted books—at least—to train generative-AI systems. One of the suits alleges “systematic theft on a mass scale,” and AI companies are potentially liable for hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.

In response, companies such as OpenAI and Meta have argued that their language models “learn” from books and produce “transformative” original work, just like humans. Therefore, they claim, no copies are being made, and the training is legal. “Use of texts to train LLaMA to statistically model language and generate original expression is transformative by nature and quintessential fair use,” Meta said in a court filing responding to one of the lawsuits last fall, referring to its generative-AI model.

Yet as the artist Karla Ortiz told a Senate subcommittee last year, AI companies use others’ work “without consent, credit, or compensation” to build products worth billions of dollars. For many writers and artists, the stakes are existential: Machines threaten to replace them with cheap synthetic output, offering prose and illustrations on command. [Continue reading…]