Veteran journalists Nicholas Gage, 84, and Nicholas Basbanes, 81, who live near each other in the same Massachusetts town, each devoted decades to reporting, writing and book authorship.
Gage poured his tragic family story and search for the truth about his mother’s death into a bestselling memoir that led John Malkovich to play him in the 1985 film “Eleni.” Basbanes transitioned his skills as a daily newspaper reporter into writing widely-read books about literary culture.
Basbanes was the first of the duo to try fiddling with AI chatbots, finding them impressive but prone to falsehoods and lack of attribution. The friends commiserated and filed their lawsuit earlier this year, seeking to represent a class of writers whose copyrighted work they allege “has been systematically pilfered by” OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft.
“It’s highway robbery,” Gage said in an interview in his office next to the 18th-century farmhouse where he lives in central Massachusetts.
LLMs are the first thing in the space to get “good enough” to cause this. But they won’t be the last. Artists of all kinds across all media will be equally disheartened.
AI (as it has been presented – not sentient, but these algorithmic approaches to generating content from existing patterns) is a great example of (some) STEM folks not understanding the social consequences of something before opening Pandora’s Box. It’s also a new way to steal.