One of the great “be careful what you wish for” stories is The Monkey’s Paw in which a family receives a magic item that grants wishes but discovers to their horror that all the wishes are granted in terrible, horrible ways. I can’t remember when I last read the story (though I’m confident I have—maybe in high school?), but monkey paw has stuck in my brain as the metaphor for this idea that wishes can go terribly, terribly wrong, so you really ought to think them through.

Look, maybe this is a genuine misstep on OpenAI’s part, but it still feels to me like the company started with the guardrails off so that it could use this kind of user backlash to push the Overton Window in conversations with rightsholders. Also, remember that we small potatoes rightsholders will never be able to have our voices heard like Disney or Nintendo.

Something feels off here. An AI CEO who claims they genuinely didn’t anticipate copyright and deepfake concerns is either dumb or playing dumb. I can’t help but suspect the latter, which is arguably worse, since it suggests an effort to shift the discourse before complaints come in.

I continue to believe that cracking down on intellectual property is not the right way to resist AI, but Koebler does a great job of describing how maddening it is that big companies are going to get away with worse infringement than individual people taking advantage of fair use.

This morning on Bluesky, I saw some posts about a class action lawsuit against Anthropic for their use of pirated, copyrighted materials in training their generative AI models. One of the sources of these copyrighted materials was the LibGen database, which I took a peek at nearly six months ago to confirm what I was already sure to be true: that my scientific writing was also collected as training material by companies like Anthropic or Meta.

Again, I’m not sure copyright is the way to go in fighting immoral generative AI companies (that the ALA and EFF are on Anthropic’s side seems important to me), but “we have to be able to do this to be successful” still strikes me as such a hollow, self-serving argument.

I don’t think copyright is the best argument against generative AI (strengthening copyright law will benefit big companies more than small creators), but “can’t make an AI omelette without breaking a few copyrighted eggs 🤷🤷🤷” is still a depressingly cynical national policy.

When I was in grad school, a faculty member in my program told me a story about his then-quite-young son, who was having a grand old time climbing on top of the kitchen table and then leaping off of it to the floor below. (Truth be told, my memories of this conversation are fuzzy, and the son might have been engaged in some otherwise dangerous behavior.) The father tried to tell the son to stop doing this, warning: “You could have hurt yourself!

Generative AI products make me mad, I don’t like them, and I’m not going to defend them. That said, if this gets framed as a copyright problem, is there any way to give Studio Ghibli (or Pixar or the Seuss estate) power to cry foul here that doesn’t also shut down fan art, parodies, and the like? I’m skeptical, and that’s why I think “labor” is the more productive—if more legally ambiguous—framing here.

Thanks to this article from The Atlantic that I saw on Bluesky, I’ve been able to confirm something that I’ve long assumed to be the case: that my creative and scholarly work is being used to train generative AI tools. More specifically, I used the searchable database embedded in the article to search for myself and find that at least eight of my articles (plus two corrections) are available in the LibGen pirate library—which means that they were almost certainly used by Meta to train their Llama LLM.