Are you considering using an AI algorithm such as ChatGPT to write a book? If so, there are many reasons not to do this, and to instead hire a professional ghostwriter.
One key reason is that the quality of your book will be poor. As the product of an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, your book will be nothing more than a rehash of the most common junk on the internet, and AI algorithms are notorious for being unable to discern between fact and fiction. There’s even a name for this terrible weakness: “AI hallucination” is a phenomenon wherein a generative AI chatbot or computer vision tool perceives patterns or objects that are inaccurate, creating outputs that are nonsensical or false.
Do you want your digital ghostwriter to be susceptible to AI hallucination? Certainly not!
Lawsuits Against ChatGPT Are Mounting
If that weren’t enough, human authors are starting to take legal action, charging OpenAI with plagiarism. George R. R. Martin, the author of the Game of Thrones book series, is among a group of 17 authors who have charged ChatGPT, a product of OpenAI, a Microsoft-backed company, with using their copyrighted novels to train the popular AI chatbot.
The collective lawsuit was filed by the Authors Guild, representing 17 authors, including Jodi Picoult, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, and George R. R. Martin. In the lawsuit, the authors allege that OpenAI copied their works “wholesale, unauthorized, or without compensation” and used them to train ChatGPT. The company allegedly trained ChatGPT on a dataset that included text illicitly uploaded from authors’ books to the internet, rather than using publicly available data, and that the authors are owed a licensing fee.
The lawsuit charges that the use of AI chatbots allows companies to create materials that “represent, mimic, summarize, or otherwise communicate” the works of authors. “These algorithms lie at the heart of Defendants’ massive commercial enterprise, and at the center of these algorithms is systematic theft on a mass scale.”
The case has garnered significant attention within the tech industry and intellectual property circles, as it raises fundamental questions about the ownership and originality of AI-generated content. ChatGPT harms the market for authors, say the plaintiffs, as it can mimic, summarize, or paraphrase their work, which amounts to copyright infringement.
The complete list of plaintiffs includes David Baldacci, Mary Bly, Michael Connelly, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, Elin Hilderbrand, Christina Baker Kline, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Victor Lavalle, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, Douglas Preston, Roxana Robinson, George Saunders, Scott Turow, and Rachel Vail.
The New York Times Vs. OpenAI
The New York Times has taken action. In August 2023, the NYT blocked OpenAI’s web crawler, meaning that OpenAI can’t use content from the publication to train its AI models. That means that if you use OpenAI to research or write your book, it cannot access the pre-eminent American newspaper.
NPR has reported The New York Times may be considering legal action against OpenAI for intellectual property rights violations. If it did sue, the NYT would be joining others including Matthew Butterick, a programmer and lawyer who alleges the company’s data scraping practices amount to software piracy, as well as Sarah Silverman and two other authors who sued the company in July 2023 over its use of Books3, a dataset used to train ChatGPT that may have thousands of copyrighted works.
So if you’re considering using OpenAI to ghostwrite your novel or non-fiction book, you might want to think about the possible legal ramifications.
