The Creative Tangle of AI, Authors, and Copyright

Nailing the complex issues surrounding AI and creative rights

Regardless of whether or not you're skilled as a lawyer, YouTuber extraordinaire Matt Wolfe made some fantastic observations when it comes to authors, AI, and storytelling. This is a landscape fraught with emotional, legal, and ethical intricacies. Here, we'll dive into Matt's commentary and add a few insights of our own to better understand the increasingly complicated relationship between AI-generated content and traditional authorship.

I actually think that the authors probably aren't going to win these because at the end of the day the way AI works and the way these AIs are trained is essentially the same way that a human is trained.

Absolutely! Matt's points on the confluence of AI, copyright, and the creative process are spot-on. The discussion about AI generating text and potentially infringing on the creative rights of authors has a lot of layers to it. On one hand, I get where authors are coming from—their work is their livelihood, and they want to protect that. But on the other hand, creativity is such a nebulous thing, inspired by countless sources. Who's to say where influence ends and copying begins?

Now if somebody grows up to become an author and throughout their life they read books by George RR Martin, they read books by John Grisham, they read books by Michael Crichton and Stephen King and all of these authors and then they grow up to write their own book and their books are heavily influenced by all of the works that they've read up until then that's essentially how the AI is working.

Every author, every creator, is a sum total of their influences. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants in some way. When I analyze stories and explore their underlying structures in Narrative First and Subtxt, what becomes apparent is that, at their core, many stories share the same foundational building blocks. The specific execution—now that's where the magic happens. That's where the author's unique voice shines through.

Now these complaints about how if AI consumes all of these books and then we ask it questions about those books and then it could give us responses so then we don't need to go read those books, well isn't that already happening on YouTube?Aren't there already like book reviews out there where somebody read the book and then gave you a general quick synopsis so you don't have to read it? Well, that person who made that synopsis for you did the same thing the AI did. They ingested the book and then figured out how to summarize it in an easier way for you to understand.

People have been summarizing books, movies, and all sorts of stories for as long as stories have existed. The intent here is usually to either help someone understand the essence of the story or to pique their interest enough to experience it themselves. Whether it's YouTube reviews, CliffsNotes, or good old-fashioned word-of-mouth, human-generated summaries have been around forever. AI is merely the new kid on the block.

Same thing goes if me and you were just having a conversation, if I read an entire book and you said oh I'll probably never read that, can you tell me what it's about, I can regurgitate it based on me consuming it and what I understood. The AI is just doing that same thing.

AI mimics the same process we all do when we summarize a book for a friend who probably won't read it--or even when we break down a fantastic story into its foundational thematic structure (like we do in Subtxt). At its core, this is just information-sharing, which is as old as humanity itself. And honestly, if our thematic breakdowns compel someone to read the book or watch a film they never would have considered in the past, isn't that a win-win for everyone, including the author?

If you kind of look at it from that perspective of well if an AI can consume a book and then sort of tell you what it understands about the book based on questions you ask of it well then the AI would have to then somehow pay the author royalties because they were able to give you some information about the book, does that mean me reading the book I would have to now pay the author some sort of royalty because I consume the book and then turn [...]

Exactly! The royalty argument gets really complicated here. Think about how many times you've discussed a movie's plot with someone or mentioned an interesting concept from a non-fiction book. Do we owe those creators royalties for disseminating their ideas in casual conversation? If the answer is "no" for us, why should it be "yes" for AI?

It's a very gray area subject but based on the sort of logic that plays out in my head around it I have a hard time seeing alot of these authors win these lawsuits...but again I'm not a lawyer so take what I say with a grain of salt.

The legal landscape will probably have to evolve to keep up with the capabilities of AI, but as Matt pointed out, the line between human-generated content and AI-generated content is increasingly blurred. The ethical considerations surrounding this are complex, but I'm not entirely convinced that authors will win outright if they choose to sue AI companies over alleged copyright infringement. Creativity itself is an amalgamation of past experiences, inspirations, and, of course, unique insights. AI is just another tool in the box, albeit a more advanced one, mimicking this process.