A Letter About AI, Not Written by AI
The WGA is encouraging creators whose work was used to train AI to reach out to the Copyright Office. This is what I sent.*
*this version has a lot fewer typos and more clarity than what I actually sent this morning when I first woke up
What are your thoughts on AI?
I'm a member of the Writers Guild of America and a #1 NYT bestselling novelist. My novels—weird, imperfect creations only possible because of my interpretation of my strange life—have been used to train AI. Somewhere out there, AI can spit out versions of Stiefvater. My labored metaphors. My sly dialog. My point of view on science and miracles. All of me, taken and processed, without my knowing. Odd. Odd times.
The temptation is to shout DO YOU SEE HOW THIS ISN'T FAIR?
Of course it isn't fair, but much of life isn't fair. AI isn't the first to knock off my works; I've been doing this long enough now that other writers have been contracted to write versions of my work and other writers have published fanfictions with my characters' names scrubbed off. These fall into a nebulous pool of legal gray area and homage.
But AI’s current iteration does not. Letting AI scrub the content of published works is no different than a schoolkid grabbing phrases from enough online sources to cobble together a paper the professor might not be able to identify as plagiarized. AI just does it on a massive scale, looking over every shoulder at every paper it can get its digital hands on. THAT'S NOT FAIR. But more relevantly: it’s not allowed. We have already decided this.
AI training seems like a thorny situation from the outside, but I urge you to distill the matter to its essential form and take action. Ask who is truly benefiting from this technology in this format. Are we really making work easier and content better through sophisticated Madlibs filled in with other people's work? No, AI is the guy at the party who sounds clever as he repeats phrases he read online without synthesizing the information in the slightest.
That’s a metaphor—I employed it because I've met that guy, I’ve lived that life. Has AI?
Sincerely,
Maggie Stiefvater
"AI is the guy at the party who sounds clever as he repeats phrases he read online without synthesizing the information in the slightest."
PREACH, my friend.
I think there are uses for AI--but they stop when the users are trying to make money off other people's work that was used to train the algorithm. For example, as a writer with aphantasia, I find it really helpful to use AI to generate reference pictures of my characters so I can turn them into a wallpaper to put on my phone while I'm drafting. But now that I'm marketing a book, I've hired an artist to create art of those characters, because I'm not going to use what basically amounts to stolen work to try to get other people to buy my books. I also think of...I think it was the Into the SpiderVerse team that trained an in-house AI model *with ONLY their own work* to help streamline their animation process--to me, that's similar to working on a communications team and writing boilerplate for things like a "contact us" paragraph or a signature block, etc.
But in terms of using other people's creativity, taken without their permission, to churn out knockoffs and then profit? Nope, nope, nope.