18 Comments
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Bette A. Ludwig, PhD 🌱's avatar

I’m still thinking through a lot of this, especially the questions around ownership and what permission even means online. It’s a complicated issue and I can see both sides.

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Paul Chaney's avatar

It is complicated, Bette. But on face value, Neela's term, shoplifting at scale, rings true. I don't mind AI scraping the content that I create on the interwebs. In fact, I want it to so that I show up in search returns. But my books. That's another matter.

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Baird Brightman's avatar

Good coverage of the issue, Paul. My view: taking a person's labor without consent or compensation is THEFT, plain and simple, no matter how some may try to rationalize it. Remember Napster?

https://medium.com/@bairdbrightman/stop-thief-chatgpt-midjourney-ai-etc-6be4a058e098

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Paul Chaney's avatar

Yep. I sure do. And Limewire. And Bittorrent.

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Lexy M's avatar

thank you for raising awareness on this topic, Paul. This is plain theft and it's sad these LLM's take other's people's work without their consent.

Another issue is the fact that new authors can be tempted to use LLM's to write their own books - and basically regurgitate thoughts of other authors. I did a test for my fantasy novel - by asking Chat GPT to provide names for certain locations / characters - and most of them are locations / names of characters from other fantasy stories (most of them I knew them already as I devour fantasy books). LLM's do not create something new, they just respond based on the data that was fed into them. That's what authors who are tempted to write books using AI should understand.

Also thank you for sharing practical steps on how to protect your work, this is very useful.

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Paul Chaney's avatar

I think it depends on what you’re writing. A fantasy novel is one thing, but I write B2B technical content that would take hours or days to produce without AI’s help. It’s not copy/paste, but it saves a tremendous amount of time spent in research and ideation.

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Neela 🌶️'s avatar

Start rant

AI companies LOVE to say, "We’re democratizing knowledge.” But whose knowledge, exactly? It’s not democratic if creators don’t consent or benefit. If the system requires piracy to progress, maybe we should question the system, not just the ethics, but the sustainability.

If I paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa, is it a new work, or is it still hers with my graffiti?

The argument that LLMs “transform” content feels intellectually lazy when the transformation is statistical, not creative. These models don’t reinterpret.

They remix. That matters to me.

I call it synthetic plagiarism at scale.

end rant

Happy Wednesday, Paul :)

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Paul Chaney's avatar

Thanks, Neela. Happy Wednesday to you, too. You hit the nail on the proverbial head yet again. The pressure is building, so I have to believe the lawsuits will hold sway.

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Neela 🌶️'s avatar

They will - I have been trying to write an article about AI ethics for almost 3 weeks now.

Hopefully I finish sometime soon lol

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Paul Chaney's avatar

I can't wait to read it. I'll for sure share and perhaps cross-post to my readers.

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Neela 🌶️'s avatar

I doubt "they" will give me the green light to publish but stranger things have happened lol

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Paul Chaney's avatar

I hope they do.

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Hans Jorgensen's avatar

This seems like a huge ethical consideration; thanks for sharing about it here.

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Paul Chaney's avatar

It really is. Authors put in an enormous amount of time and effort, only to have AI scrape their content without so much as a "howdy-do." Um, no. As we say down south, "That dog won't hunt." There has to be some way to acknowledge or remunerate authors for use of their content.

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David Meerman Scott's avatar

Thanks for digging into this Paul. I'm happy for the LLMs to train on all my free content (21 years of blog posts for example). However, I don't agree to stealing my copyrighted paid book content.

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Paul Chaney's avatar

I'm with you there, David. There are advantages to training -- SEO (or AIO), for example -- but books we toiled over with blood, sweat, and tears, for which we were paid, is another matter entirely. Thanks for weighing in.

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Dee McCrorey's avatar

Well, matey, my vote is privacy theft! (And, yes, my book and a slew of my articles are found in LibGen...arr!)

Enjoyed the essay--good info and practical takeaways!

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Paul Chaney's avatar

Thank you, Dee. Love it that you got my kitsch.

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