BOOKISH: A.I. is a Bad Friend

An AI expert says we’ll soon have artificially intelligent friends. Bots will talk to us, inquire about our day, discuss the news, etc. I have a hard time being against this. I’ll take all the friends I can get.

There’s only one problem. AI is a bad friend. It makes mistakes, large and small, then apologizes. But it’s a very fake apology. A bot doesn’t feel bad. They can’t feel anything, they’re machines.

The day a bot feels bad, pull the plug. Fast.

Many writers find AI a very good friend. AI clarifies sentences, reorders concepts, scouts redundancies, trims or expands dialog, narrates scenes. All things the writer should do, but can’t.

I’m not sure these people are writers. They just want their name on a book and call themselves a writer. Like the singer who relies on auto-tune just wants their name on an album and call themselves a singer. Like the dentist who relies on YouTube just wants their name… Boy, I hope that isn’t happening.

AI can’t really write. It can only harvest and record, then repeat and reorder. To do this, a machine must be fed original writing, written by actual people.

Cue what will one day be known as the first of The Great AI Lawsuits: Bartz v. Anthropic, settled just recently.

The case is complicated. A wealthy and powerful AI company, Anthropic, took half a million books and fed these into their machine. The authors sued, claiming copyright infringement. A judge agreed, even though copyright infringement is dependent on the offender publishing another’s work, which Anthropic did not do.

Told you it was complicated.

None of this makes a whole lot of sense. Not that the winning authors care. They are happy to get a little money (about $3,000 each) and feel vindicated. But these authors should take note, because this is an impuissant decision.

Sidebar: I’ve been waiting all my life to use the word impuissant, and now I have. Sorry, back to the article.

This decision is weak because it purports to settle an AI copyright issue. It does not.

Let me give an example. Say I copy from AI and publish. If my little friend has supplied me with copyrighted material, and AI does this all the time, I am on the hook for any lawsuit, not the bot.

So writers, if you still think AI is a nice pal to have around, good luck. Because when real trouble starts, as we all know, certain friends have a way of vanishing into thin air.