Margaret Atwood responds to the revelation that pirated copies of her books are being used to train AI.
Remember The Stepford Wives? Maybe not. In that 1975 horror film, the human wives of Stepford, Connecticut, are having their identities copied and transferred to robotic replicas of themselves, minus any contrariness that their husbands find irritating. The robot wives then murder the real wives and replace them. Better sex and better housekeeping for the husbands, death for the uniqueness, creativity, and indeed the humanity of the wives.
The companies developing generative AI seem to have something like that in mind for me, at least in my capacity as an author. (The sex and the housekeeping can be done by other functionaries, I assume.) Apparently, 33 of my books have been used as training material for their wordsmithing computer programs. Once fully trained, the bot may be given a command—“Write a Margaret Atwood novel”—and the thing will glurp forth 50,000 words, like soft ice cream spiraling out of its dispenser, that will be indistinguishable from something I might grind out. (But minus the typos.) I myself can then be dispensed with—murdered by my replica, as it were—because, to quote a vulgar saying of my youth, who needs the cow when the milk’s free?
To add insult to injury, the bot is being trained on pirated copies of my books. Now, really! How cheap is that? Would it kill these companies to shell out the measly price of 33 books? They intend to make a lot of money off the entities they have reared and fattened on my words, so they could at least buy me a coffee.
[Read: The authors whose pirated works are powering generative AI]
A certain amount of hair-tearing and hair-splitting is bound to go on over such matters as copyright licenses and “fair use.” I will leave those more knowledgeable about the hair business to go at it. I recall, though, some of the more fatuous comments that were made in my country during the “fair use” debate some years ago, when the Canadian government was passing a bill that in effect granted universities the right to repackage the texts of books gratis, and then sell them to students, pocketing the change. But what are writers to live on? was the question. Oh, they can, you know, get grants and teach creative writing in universities and so on, was the airy reply from one lad, an academic. He had clearly never existed as a freelancer.
Beyond the royalties and copyrights, what concerns me is the idea that an author’s voice and mind are replicable. As young smarty-pants, we used to write parodies of writers older and more accomplished than ourselves. The more mannered an author, the easier it was for us. Hemingway? Dead simple! (Dead. Simple.) Henry James? Max Beerbohm had beat us to it, with his baroque masterpiece, The Mote in the Middle Distance. Shakespeare? Nay, needs’t thou ask, thou lily-livered pup? Jane Austen? Jane visits the dentist: “It is a tooth universally acknowledged …” The sentence structure, the vocabulary—adjectives and adverbs, especially—the cadence, the subject matter: All were our fodder, as they are the fodder, too, of chatbots. But we were doing it for fun, not to impersonate, to deceive, to collect, and to render the author superfluous.
Orwell, of course, was there before: In 1984, there are machines that crank out trashy romance novels as opium for the proles, and I suppose if a literary form is generic and formulaic enough, a bot might be able to compose examples of it. But judging from the attempt recently made with one of these entities—“Write a Margaret Atwood science-fiction short story about a dystopian future”—anything more complex and convincing is as yet beyond it. The result, quite frankly, was pedestrian in the extreme, and if I actually wrote like that, I would defenestrate myself immediately. The program, so far, does not understand figurative language, let alone irony and allusion, and its flat-footed prose was the opposite of effective storytelling. But who knows what the machines might yet achieve? you may say. I’ll wait and see. Maybe they’ll at least turn out a mediocre murder mystery or two.
[Read: Go ahead and ban my book]
I am, however, reminded of the Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Nightingale.” The clockwork bird can sing, but only the song with which it has been programmed. It can’t improvise. It can’t riff. It can’t surprise. And it is in surprise that much of the delight of art resides: Otherwise, boredom sets in quickly. Only the living bird can sing a song that is ever renewed, and therefore always delightful.
A former teacher of mine once said there was only one important question to be asked of a work of art: “Is it alive, or is it dead?” Judging from the results I’ve seen so far, AI can produce “art” of a kind. It sort of looks like art; it sort of sounds like art. But it’s made by a Stepford Author. And it’s dead.
