Noopur Bhandiwad, Pune
More than 8000 authors have signed an open letter to the leaders of AI companies like Open AI CEO, Sam Altman, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichhai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Stability CEOs Arvind Krishna of IBM, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, and Emad Mostaque.
Among the signers of the letter, titled “Open Letter to Generative AI Leaders” were acclaimed authors like Margaret Atwood, Suzanne Collins, Jodi Picoult, and James Patterson. The authors protested against the use of their works to train AI systems without permission or compensation.
The letter reads, “Millions of copyrighted books, articles, essays, and poetry provide the “food” for AI systems, endless meals for which there has been no bill.” The authors demanded that since the AI company leaders are investing billions of dollars in the development of AI technology, they must compensate the authors for using their writings, “without AI would be banal and extremely limited.”
The letter further elaborates on the damage saying that generative AI poses a threat to the writers’ profession by imposing mediocre, machine-written books, journalism, and stories based on their works.
Mentioning an Authors Guild study that surveyed over 5700 participants, it was found that there has been a 40% drop in the earnings of the authors in the past decade, with full-time writers’ media income in 2022 amounting to just $23,330.
According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, it is uncertain as to the legality of obtaining permissions for large amounts of text data used to train AI systems, which is often sourced from the internet.
In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, Open AI said that Chat GPT is trained on “licensed content created by human AI trainers and users.” They further stated that the company is respectful of the rights of authors and creators.