When two octogenarian buddies named Nick discovered that ChatGPT might be stealing and repurposing a lifetime of their work, they tapped a son-in-law to sue the companies behind the artificial intelligence chatbot.

Veteran journalists Nicholas Gage, 84, and Nicholas Basbanes, 81, who live near each other in the same Massachusetts town, each devoted decades to reporting, writing and book authorship.

Gage poured his tragic family story and search for the truth about his mother’s death into a bestselling memoir that led John Malkovich to play him in the 1985 film “Eleni.” Basbanes transitioned his skills as a daily newspaper reporter into writing widely-read books about literary culture.

Basbanes was the first of the duo to try fiddling with AI chatbots, finding them impressive but prone to falsehoods and lack of attribution. The friends commiserated and filed their lawsuit earlier this year, seeking to represent a class of writers whose copyrighted work they allege “has been systematically pilfered by” OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft.

“It’s highway robbery,” Gage said in an interview in his office next to the 18th-century farmhouse where he lives in central Massachusetts.

  • @Yprum
    4•1 month ago

    I just wanted to say, it’s refreshing to read a well argumented comment such as this one. It’s good to see every once in a while there are still some people thinking things through without falling for automatic hatred to either side of a discussion.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 month ago

      You’re too kind. But I’ve only made it to this (still very incomplete) point by making lots of absolutely terrible arguments first, with plenty of failing-to-think-things-through and automatic hatred.

      Most importantly, I listen to a lot of people who either disagree with my initial takes or just have lots of experience with policy in this space.

      Cory Doctorow is always a great landmark for me, personally, because he embodies the pro-culture tech-forward pirate ethos while also stridently defending artists’ rights and dignity.

      Some great stuff from him includes:

      • How to think about scraping
      • What kind of bubble is AI?
      • Chokepoint Capitalism
      • Some of his crypto interviews, like I think his one for Life Itself was good even though the interviewer was pretty milquetoast
      • His appearances on Team Human (with Douglas Rushkoff) and just Team Human in general

      Ironically, this ancient video on the toxic history of copyright law – and warning against regulating similar technology going forward – makes some pretty good points against AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhBpI13dxkI

      Also check out the actual history of the Luddites. Cool Zone Media has a lot of coverage of them.

      Also Philosophy Tube has a good one about transhumanism that has a section dismantling the “it’s just a tool” mindset you’ll see pretty often on Lemmy regarding AI.

      And CJTheX has a good transhumanism essay, too.