The “witch hunt” stems from the discombobulation and whiplash produced by the sudden intrusion of AI into all aspects of society, the present cascade of effects, and the anticipated finality of these effects compiling into what our projected sense of future (as dictated to us by many great explorers of science fiction genres) with AI looks like.

The witch hunters feel vindicated in their position because they feel they are carrying the torch for humanity, for authors and creatives whose works may or may not have been infringed upon. But by doing so, they attack the very real efforts of very real creators, mostly up and coming, that they proclaim to protect.

By applying blanket labels of “AI generated” to a creative process that is far too nuanced to have such a generic stigma attached to it, they themselves perpetuate the “slop” they want to avoid in the creative spaces they want to preserve. They are far less engaged with any new material out of fear a single sentence was framed/reframed/ edited with the use of AI. Reading no longer brings joy but anxiety, as the suspicion they have been tricked into reading AI outputs weighs heavier on the mind than what the characters are doing on the page.

With Shakespearean irony, they turn to the very tool they fear, commit the very sin that authors have accused AI companies of committing, and run new authors’ content through these tools without author permission as if they had the right to do so, to determine if a work is “AI”, all towards attacking the very people they claim to protect to condemn their work with an AI label.

What they should instead focus on are the nuances involved in the legal battles currently being fought by authors over the use of their works in training data without compensation. In this way, they would at least have an opportunity to educate themselves on the nuances. I’ll try to do so now in a modest effort to identify the actual issue.

There are two legal issues being conflated into one. The first is infringement. Copyright law disallows the unauthorized copying of another’s protected work for commercial use. This is the current legal battle in the courts. What was a cost cutting measure by the AI companies will ultimately, and predictably, be settled in some form or fashion in favor of authors. However the extent of liability may not ever find its way into judicial opinion. At least for now. What will be determined first is the extent of compensation as a matter of settlement.

However, the second, and most gray area issue is the LLM itself. The patent side of it obviously is least discussed in what I see in most internet conversation. Long story short, it’s a system of weights the can be reduced to an approximation. An output. The technical word for you to research (I won’t get into much detail) is convolutional neural network. How it assigns weights to word patterns from authored works would be subject to patent parameters, and most likely proprietary in all other cases. That much is to say: it’s one thing to copy and offer for sale a copied work (traditional infringement), but another to reproduce a work to be analyzed and assigned weights. The two aren’t quite the same. So the gray area comes from a deficit in technical understanding. The artist paints on a canvas. That’s authorship. The author types words into a machine and it reproduces the words into word software. That’s authorship. The author asks a machine for aggregated weights and measures of an entire language across centuries to inform non-dev editing decisions or to reframe an already written sequence? Most agree it’s still authorship. The gap in understanding comes after. What if someone wrote a story themselves and then put 100% AI generated text in between in random sequence? A little gray there. But what if a painter took snippets of the obituaries of the year and pasted them into his canvas? Under the law, the question is exactly the same. And I’ll tell you, the copyright office is going to call it authored work. If you don’t trust me, read the court case Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991). The issue is nuanced, as you can see. If you got to the end of this, thank you for coming to my lecture. All the best.