Not everyone can be Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. Most authors make very little off their books. Few can live off royalties, and even fewer get substantial advances. A billion-dollar company stealing anyone’s work (including publishing heavyhitters) feels like a giant slap in the face. With the U.S. lacking AI laws and regulations on the federal and state levels, it gets even trickier for creatives to protect their IP and receive fair compensation.
AI Presents Unique Challenges for Class Action Lawsuits
As reported by The Authors Guild, legal action was taken against Meta in 2023, and all authors affected by Meta’s LLaMa 3 training have automatically been included in the Kadrey v. Meta class action in northern California. However, the case is still ongoing and hangs on one important fact: is Meta in violation of direct copyright infringement?
With AI being what it is, copyright gets complicated, especially when combined with Meta’s fair use defense. Essentially, fair use allows you to bypass getting permission from the copyright holder for purposes like criticism, teaching, reporting, and research. In most cases, the work is “transformative,” meaning it adds something new to the original material. And due to Meta’s LLM ingesting, digesting, and spitting out a Frankensteinian text generator, the fair use argument unfortunately has some legs. However, as Dan Pontefract pointed out in a Forbes article, “fair use arguments were meant for education, commentary, and criticism, not corporate exploitation for commercial profit at scale.”
Whether direct copyright infringement holds weight or not, Meta’s raid of LibGen, which houses more than 7.5 million pirated books, raises ethical concerns and spotlights the need for more AI laws and regulations.
Tech Raids Prove AI Laws Are Necessary
AI isn’t going anywhere. To toss out another Frankenstein metaphor, we created a monster that can’t just be abandoned. For many, AI offers unmatched efficiency, task automation, and a new way of delegating mundane tasks with better accuracy. Certain fields undoubtedly benefit from AI, but Meta proves books and other creative media aren’t among them.
Mark Twain once said, “There is no such thing as new ideas.” It’s an argument frequently used in pro-generative AI circles. If everyone is recycling ideas, how is AI any different? However, generative AI isn’t just coded; it’s trained on the published works of artists and writers. Their inspiration may have come from the creations of old, but they still sat, thought, and created something new with human talents and flaws. Agatha Christie had to plot out her mystery novels. She couldn’t just plop them into ChatGPT and type, “Write me an ending.” But thanks to her efforts, now anyone can use generative AI to cook up a locked room whodunit mystery with likely a familiar conclusion. This leads to a host of issues, like who actually owns the work if it’s created from a compilation of many copyright holders?
