ChatGPT vs. Authors
Perhaps you’ve seen the headline that authors such as George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen, and Jodi Picoult are suing OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, for copying authors’ work “wholesale, without permission or consideration.” ChatGPT works by digesting and regurgitating information found online (fair game, I guess), but AI critics have argued that Google, Microsoft, etc. also feed their systems pirated books found online. According to the lawsuit: “At the heart of these algorithms is systematic theft on a mass scale.” It is seeking damages for “the lost opportunity to license their work” — some media companies, for instance, have actually licensed their archives to AI. So maybe some authors would be ok with having their work used this way…they just want to be compensated for it.
Yet, this: One of David Brooks’ columns this summer was an explanation of how cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter went from embracing AI as a “limitationist” (i.e. it’s good for some things, but it has its limits) to becoming a bit of an AI alarmist. ChatGPT, he says, “just renders humanity a very small phenomenon compared to something else that is far more intelligent and will become incomprehensible to us, as incomprehensible to us as we are to cockroaches… We’re approaching the stage when we’re going to have a hard time saying that this machine is totally unconscious. We’re going to have to grant it some degree of consciousness, some degree of aliveness,” he says. (Yikes?)
I don’t really know anything about the technology besides what I read in the news, but Hofstadter’s belief is the one that moves me and that I actively choose to get behind.
The last book I posted about (Lorrie Moore) is a great example of why; you can read my quick one-sentence summary of what it’s “about.” But that novel is not about the plot, per se. It simply provides the bones (so to speak 🧟♀️) because, really, it’s the very subtle turns of phrases, the unexpected imagery, the surprising and fine-tuned wordsmithing that are the little nudges that indicate to a reader that someone special and unique has written this. I just can’t wrap my head — or my heart — around the idea that that is replicable.
originally published on instagram