A few weeks later, on September 25, a second article from Reisner went live: “These 183,000 Books Are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech.” This time The Atlantic included a tool for anyone to “look up authors…and see which of their titles are included.” Which brings me back to the anecdote I began with: As The Atlantic’s searchable database made the rounds online, authors who’d discovered they were included in Books3 started posting on social media with varying degrees of anger and incredulity.
“I would never have consented for Meta to train AI on any of my books, let alone five of them,” tweeted the three-time National Book Award finalist Lauren Groff. “Hyperventilating.”
“I put so much thought, attention, and time into each word, each semicolon, of my fiction,” the novelist R.O. Kown told The Washington Post. “I don’t quite believe in souls, but if I did, a novel is as close to being a sizable piece of my soul as anything could be.”
In my Instagram feed, I scrolled past a particularly animated missive from Mary H.K. Choi, who’d just been through the ringer with the Hollywood writers strike. “As someone for whom ‘voice’ is paramount,” Choi lamented to her 27,200-something followers, “I’m completely gutted and whipsawed. I am outraged and at the same time feel utterly helpless. I feel sheepish as though I’m fist shaking at the internets or machinery and I’ve often made the joke that after Armageddon they’ll bring writers back after soul cycle instructors but I’m scared. I’m furious and want to fight but I’m also so tired.”
Back in June, I published an article about how media organizations were collectively grappling with the threat posed by AI to their already sufficiently threatened business models. In the early days of the web, many had started giving their content away for free online, a fatal decision that led to their lunch being gobbled up by tech giants like Google and Facebook. Now, as AI bots become frighteningly efficient at mining content produced by humans in order to mimic humans, news publishers wanted to “make sure they don’t get screwed again.” CEOs like Robert Thomson, Barry Diller, and others had begun speaking out about the need to “be more collectively assertive,” as Thomson put it, “in haggling for the values and virtues of journalism”; or to stand up to AI-makers and declare, in Diller’s words, “You cannot scrape our content…and use it in real time to actually cannibalize everything.”
In the four months since I wrote that story, AI has faced mounting pressure from the content community (for lack of a better umbrella term). Screenwriters have secured robust guardrails against the use of AI in Hollywood productions, a key rallying cry in the recent Writers Guild of America strike. Executives from dozens of print and digital media outlets—some of which have already started blocking AI crawlers from their websites—recently swarmed Capitol Hill to lobby lawmakers for AI protections, and representatives from various creative fields brought their concerns to the Federal Trade Commission during a roundtable on the “Creative Economy and Generative AI.” Companies like Axel Springer, Diller’s IAC, and The New York Times have reportedly explored legal action, and AI platforms have been in conversations with content providers who want to extract licensing payments.
“What you’ll see over time is a lot of litigation. Some media companies have already begun those discussions,“ News Corp’s Thomson said last month at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference. “Personally, we’re not interested in that at this stage. We’re much more interested in negotiation. We have various negotiations going on.”
The most aggressive action so far has come from the book world. Just days before The Atlantic’s searchable Books3 database started making noise, the Authors Guild and a group of individual authors filed a class action copyright lawsuit in the Southern District of New York against OpenAI, which is seen as the leader in generative AI development. It was the latest in a series of class action suits brought by authors, such as Michael Chabon and Sarah Silverman, claiming that companies like OpenAI and Meta had used unauthorized and pirated copies of their books to train AI models. The Authors Guild lawsuit was the most high-profile and attention-grabbing of the bunch, landing with a New York Times story and the participation of 17 name-brand novelists, including a murderers’ row of mass-market A-listers like David Baldacci, Michael Connelly, John Grisham, and George R.R. Martin.
“I’m very happy to be part of this effort to nudge the tech world to make good on its frequent declarations that it is on the side of creativity,” George Saunders said in an accompanying statement. (He didn’t have anything to add when we exchanged emails last week.) “Writers should be fairly compensated for their work. Fair compensation means that a person’s work is valued, plain and simple. This, in turn, tells the culture what to think of that work and the people who do it. And the work of the writer—the human imagination, struggling with reality, trying to discern virtue and responsibility within it—is essential to a functioning democracy.”
Another one of the plaintiffs, Douglas Preston, expressed similar sentiments during the FTC roundtable on October 4. “Many authors were discovering that ChatGPT-3 knew everything about their books,” he said, “and some realized it was even being used to create works that imitated their own. My friend George R.R. Martin…was very disturbed when AI was used to write the last book in his Game of Thrones series using his characters, his plot lines, his settings—even his voice.… AI developers are swallowing everything they can get their hands on without regard to copyright ownership, intellectual property rights, or moral rights. And they’re doing this without the slightest consideration given to supporting the livelihood of America’s creative class.”
Initially, the Authors Guild didn’t intend to bring a lawsuit. Like others, they’d been in conversations with OpenAI about coming to terms on some sort of licensing agreement. “Very open, good-faith conversations,” says guild CEO Mary Rasenberger. (Those conversations are now suspended while the litigation plays out.)
Additionally, guild representatives had gone down to Washington to meet with congressional staffers and drum up support among lawmakers. But by late summer, according to Rasenberger, “it became kind of clear that we weren’t gonna get the legislation we needed anytime soon.” At the same time, “we started seeing more evidence”—such as Reisner’s Books3 reportage—“of the use of AI to mimic authors’ works,” she says. “Things like sequels to the George R.R. Martin books that he hasn’t yet written. Jane Friedman found five books purported to be written by her that were, presumably, AI-generated. We were starting to see a lot of AI-generated books on Amazon, and authors were getting upset. Creators are feeling an existential threat to their profession, so there’s a feeling of urgency.”
