I documented on this blog back in February 2023 my experience with the earliest model of ChatGPT shortly after it had been released and nobody knew very much about it. I asked it to write blog posts in the voices of Anne Lamott and John Grisham, then tried to see if it could write like me. All responses were like reading corporate boilerplate–exactly how you’d expect a soulless machine to sound.
Then word came out that students were using to write papers–reports showed that kids all the way from middle school to PHD candidates were using it to write their papers. The schools tried to stamp it out as soon as they discovered it–but got pushback from parents saying that it didn’t matter that it wasn’t the students’ own work and that everyone else was doing it so why can’t my kid?
I counted myself lucky that I’d gotten out of teaching when I had because WHAT?
Then The Atlantic started digging into how exactly ChatGPT was created–and discovered that just about the entire internet’s caches of knowledge–websites, blogs, social media, online publications, Wikipedia–had been fed into the application’s programming. Even my blog, Not Quite Right: Living with Bipolar Disorder, had been scraped. My words, offered to encourage and help others who suffered from my illness, had been taken without my consent–or any renumeration.
Later The Atlantic came out with another bombshell–Meta, who owns Facebook and Instagram, had bought LibGen–a well-known pirated books site hosting around seven million books–and used all that literary excellence to train its own AI program. Authors new and old–such as William Faulkner, Mary Miller, Willie Morris, Lee Durkee, and Beth Kander, to name a very few–had their works pillaged for this. The article also noted that Meta had considered buying the books as required under copyright law but decided against it for profit reasons.
Listen to that again–Meta purchased a book site that was already breaking the law, used its assets to break the law again, and did so with a brazen disregard for the rights of the creators of those works.
And now Amazon refuses to promise to remove AI-generated books from its online bookstore. With AI’s expansion into images and animation, creatives from all sectors of the entertainment business are losing their jobs. And a book, widely regarded as having been created by a publisher using AI with no input from a human author, currently sits at #1 in the science fiction romance category.
Where does it end?
The miserable thing is that George Orwell predicted this in his dystopian novel 1984, published in 1949. The protagonist of the novel, Winston, had a girlfriend named Julia who worked in the literature department of the Ministry of Truth, running a tricky machine that created books for mass consumption without human input. Winston says this about the process: “Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.”
Is this future what we want literature to turn into? Because barring a miracle, that’s where we’re heading.
Julie Liddell Whitehead 