A billionaire stole my baby

On being robbed by Mark Zuckerberg

An article in The Atlantic provides a tool through which you can check whether Meta’s AI programs have scraped content from works you have written. It turns out they have scraped all four of my books as well as some academic papers I contributed to.

John Uri Lloyd’s Etidorhpa (1895) (Source)

Once again—and quite rightly—the morality and legality of this sort of unauthorised practice has been raised, and it will no doubt continue to be an issue. I think it is completely right that writers and other producers of “content” should be paid for their work being used in this way, but I think there is a lot of hypocrisy in the general media discussion of the issue. Sure, the industrial scale of what the AI companies are doing adds an entirely different complexion to the practice of lifting other people’s work, but I have to say, as a writer who is often shunned by the mainstream media, I wish had a payment for every time some writer not-so-shunned has “borrowed” my arguments and reproduced them in a slightly altered form with no acknowledgement.

At least link and mention the source.

Anyway, the issue came up a while back, when I found out ChaptGPT had used one of my books for content, and I wrote a response then. I think the argument I made still holds, so I am bringing it out from behind the behind paywall and republishing it here.

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Being Borged by Artificial Intelligence

Some comments on the data theft inherent in the current business model of AI

‘All art is plagiarism.’

‘These days, if your book is not circulating as a pirated PDF, it's failed.’

—McKenzie Wark

I found out my book, Why the Future Is Workless, is one of the many millions illegally scraped to help train ChatGPT, and I had a bit of an Oscar Wilde reaction, I’m afraid. The only thing worse than being scraped by a bot to train an AI app is to not be scraped by a bot to train an AI app.

I’m being a bit flippant about this, but I do feel some reactions to these revelations about data scraping are a bit, well, precious, and in fact, this is something I have been talking about since, as it happens, the very book of mine that was scraped.

In Workless, and at greater length in The Future of Everything, I argue for the need to reconfigure the relationship between the owners of these digital technologies and the people who produce the data that they monetise. In short, we all should be paid for our data. My preferred way of doing this is via a basic income that everyone receives, but the key point is this:

We are all working for these tech companies for free by providing our data to them in a way that allows them to hide our contribution while benefiting immensely from it. It is way past time that we were paid for this hidden labour, potentially using that income to offset reductions in our formal working hours.

These latest concerns about the “illegal” use of people’s data have a different complexion because they are focussing on works of fiction appropriated by the Silicon Valley Borg, and already a few court cases are under way to protect author copyright. Writers like Richard Flanagan have voiced concerns as to why they feel violated by this data scraping, with Flanagan saying that “I felt as if my soul had been strip mined and I was powerless to stop it.”

It is good for people to explain that sense of violation if they feel it; nonetheless, I think Flanagan is on stronger legal, even moral ground when he describes what has happened as “the biggest act of copyright theft in history.”

I don’t think authors—or other artists—need surrender to this theft even when they believe that economic conditions in which they are operating should change. That may well be true, but in the meantime we all have to live in the world as we find it, and technologists don’t just get to steal our work.

So, let’s try and separate a few strands.

Creative work like writing a novel or choreographing a dance or even publishing a work of non-fiction is a form of labour, and in the debate about what is happening with apps like ChatGPT appropriating these works, I would prefer to concentrate on the labour end of the spectrum, not the creative end of it, in making the case for control and payment of work that is used in this way.

Arguing from a creative perspective gets you into the complex area of the nature of artistic creation and originality and I am of the view that all such creative work is irreducibly derivative, a social project realised via individual talents.

We are overfed on the “great man” view of history (and art), and the distortions of what we might call the US constitutional view of freedom and individuality (not to mention the capitalist idea of the market as the sole arbiter of value). In this understanding, society is a collection of individuals, each endowed with inalienable rights, whereas I think we might be better served by the perspective that argues humans are irreducibly social and that individuality arises from that sociality so that it is that we need to protect in order to establish individual freedom.

Art, then, is created, not in the enactment of individualist originality, but in the shared limitations of being human. What we think of as “great art” achieves its greatness, its beauty, even its transcendence in the limitations of the human body and it is those limitations—physical and mental—that are the stuff from which meaning emerges.

Just as games require rules, art requires these embodied limitations, and we draw on our shared experience of the world to produce it. This is not to diminish the particular abilities of individuals, or the notion of talent or even of relative worth. But it is to recognise that even that exceptionalism ultimately depends on the human limitations of the body and of the body politick.

On this level, the problem with art created by artificial intelligence apps is that they lack these human limitations—particularly embodiment—and can therefore never produce, or even reproduce, works that will move us in the way that human art can. When you lack physical, mental and social limitations, nothing is at stake in the creation of art, so that, in the end, no-one will care about the art machines make.

I’m using the concept of “great art” here and I’m confident you have a clear idea of what I mean without me defining it in detail, but really, however you define it, it is a distraction in this discussion, as much a creation of capitalist work and value structures as anything that might be produced by AI.

Australian artist Ian Millis has long argued for the invisibility of the artist and the recognition of their social nature. In this definitive essay on his work, Wendy Carlson sets out his worldview and it includes this quote from Millis:

Real creative activity is so natural and unselfconscious as to be invisible. The true artist is unrecognized even by his or her self. It would be nice to say that everybody is an artist in the real sense, but given the nature of capitalist society, it is not true, although in certain circumstances or in certain other societies it may be true. In our society, almost everyone, worker or boss, leads a life of sterile alienation, but there are exceptions. They are the people who directly tackle basic problems of everyday life, and come up with simple, beautiful, workable alternatives, solutions which are radical whether analysed in sound political, economic or aesthetic terms. If we work in this way to destroy not only art, but industrial technology and formal hierarchical politics, we can create a real culture.

In this sense then, what AI lacks and will never be able to reproduce are the social relationships in which art is produced. Again, nothing is at stake when AI “makes art” absent these constraints and so there is really nothing to fear artistically from AI.

It’s like, it would be pretty easy to build a robot that runs faster than Usain Bolt, but who cares? Nothing is at stake.

Literary critic George Steiner argued in his now unfashionable book, Real Presences, that art is critical engagement with what has come before. I read the book a hundred years ago when it first came out, but this section has always stayed with me, no matter how diminished the reception of this sort of criticism might have become:

The Divine Comedy is a reading of the Aeneid, technically and spiritually 'at home', 'authorized' in the several and interactive senses of that word, as no extrinsic commentary by one who is himself not a poet can be.

The presence, visibly solicited or exorcized, of Homer, Virgil and Dante in Milton's Paradise Lost, in the epic satire of Pope and in the pilgrimage upstream of Ezra Pound's Cantos, is a 'real presence', a critique in action. Successively, each poet sets into the urgent light of his own purposes, of his own linguistic and compositional resources, the formal and substantive achievement of his predecessor(s).

…What the Aeneid rejects, alters, omits altogether from the Iliad and the Odyssey is as critically salient and instructive as that which it includes…

…Joyce's Ulysses is a critical experiencing of the Odyssey at the level of general structure, of narrative instruments and rhetorical particularity. Joyce (like Pound) reads Homer with us.

His argument speaks to the derivative, social nature of art, and there are any number of more recent examples of “plagiarism”—-here, here, here—that raise questions about originality, creativity and art, but never settle them.

Maybe we should get over it?

I’d be interested to hear more views of this, as I know many readers here are more au fait with these matters than I am.

Speaking of which, this interview with McKenzie Wark, talking about her books on the Situationists, deals with these issues, and I found much of it interesting and worthwhile. She talks about Debord’s notion of détournement, which captures the idea that “the whole of culture is a commons that belongs to everyone. That’s how it actually works in its normal state — there's no such thing as authorized statements.”

That “everyone copies and corrects.”

This is a healthy way to understand art and creativity, I think, but nonetheless, the idea of “great art” being the exclusive product of the “great artist” is hard to shake, and I wonder if what people fear from AI—even from the internet—is that technology’s ability to repurpose data of all sorts into recognisable songs, paintings, stories, essays—no matter what we think of their worth—makes us see for the first time how irreducibly social art, and other creative work, actually is?

The problem AI is presenting us with is not new, but its scale is, and that speaks to a deeper problem with the way in which the logic of late capitalism—its extractive, destructive, and dominating tendencies—is changing the nature of work in general.

In the end, all the technologies of work under capitalism are tools for disciplining workers, and that is what we should, in the first instance, be seeking to fix.

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(PS: In the original post, I included some bonus content, a couple other things that came up as I was writing this that wouldn’t fit in the main body of the piece but I thought were mentioning.)

I wanted to mention Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Philippa Hurd), a book about the idea of “decreation” in Chinese thought. It is a reminder that so much of what we take for granted about the nature of creativity and art is deeply tied to cultural norms that we don’t always notice.

This is a summary of the book from the publisher website:

Shanzhai is a Chinese neologism that means “fake,” originally coined to describe knock-off cell phones marketed under such names as Nokir and Samsing. These cell phones were not crude forgeries but multifunctional, stylish, and as good as or better than the originals. Shanzhai has since spread into other parts of Chinese life, with shanzhai books, shanzhai politicians, shanzhai stars. There is a shanzhai Harry Potter: Harry Potter and the Porcelain Doll, in which Harry takes on his nemesis Yandomort. In the West, this would be seen as piracy, or even desecration, but in Chinese culture, originals are continually transformed—deconstructed. In this volume in the Untimely Meditations series, Byung-Chul Han traces the thread of deconstruction, or “decreation,” in Chinese thought, from ancient masterpieces that invite inscription and transcription to Maoism—“a kind a shanzhai Marxism,” Han writes.

Han discusses the Chinese concepts of quan, or law, which literally means the weight that slides back and forth on a scale, radically different from Western notions of absoluteness; zhen ji, or original, determined not by an act of creation but by unending process; xian zhan, or seals of leisure, affixed by collectors and part of the picture's composition; fuzhi, or copy, a replica of equal value to the original; and shanzhai. The Far East, Han writes, is not familiar with such “pre-deconstructive” factors as original or identity. Far Eastern thought begins with deconstruction.

Isn’t that fascinating and beautiful?

I’m also reading the book on creativity by music producer, Rick Rubin, and it is the sort of thing you can dip in an out of. Your mileage may vary.

He is big on the idea of creativity as something that comes through us, a view many artists speak about, the idea that they are unaware of where a painting or a song or story or a dance came from, that somehow, they are just the vessel for its realisation. Paul McCartney dreamed the chords and melody of Yesterday, for instance, and there are countless other stories.

Which is why I was struck by a recent interview with Paul Simon in which he mentions the late, great Robbie Robertson and his scepticism about being a conduit:

Simon says, “I would say, of the songs that came from a mysterious source, where you feel…you know, it's a bit of a cliche.

“As Robbie Robertson actually said to me, oh, yeah, you're a conduit.” (Laughs)

“You know, something where you feel as if the music is coming through you.

“You're a part of it, but it's not starting with you. It's coming from somewhere and comes through you.

“If I think back of three big examples of that, the first one was the Sounds of Silence.

“Bridge Over Troubled Water was like that when I said, wow, what is that?

“But the one that where I knew it was Graceland, the song, Graceland.”

I’m not hostile to the idea of artists being a vessel for something they can’t consciously apprehend—so that it appears to come through them from some higher source—but I think it downplays the labor that has gone into making them a vessel for inspiration in the first place, the countless hours of practice and rehearsal of their art form, whatever it is, without which no amount of inspiration is likely to amount to anything.

David Milch is another who lives by this notion of art being a collective undertaking, and mysterious, and that you need to make yourself available to it. “Then I ask,” he writes in his memoir, Life’s Work, “what do all those moments have in common? They begin with an individual and culminate in the individual finding the deepest meaning of his individuality in a going-out to something outside himself or herself.”

I happy to quote David Milch at you all day long.

“It’s the way we transcend the illusion that we are separate. That’s the gift of this peculiar signifying brain that we have.”

Or this reflection on how to get from the A of inspiration to the B of creation, using Kafka as his example.:

To suggest that our greatest writers might have been struggling with the same feelings, which we know for a fact they were, is a good thing for a writer to live into. There are ways to turn problems of spirit into problems of technique—that’s another kind of indirection. Kafka was just a miserable, miserable human being. Pathologically shy and physically ill, but he wanted to tell stories. So one morning Gregor Samsa woke up and discovered he was a bug. All of his misery is now a problem of technique. How does a bug live in a family where the rest are human beings? People speak of the symbolic philosophical resonance of that work, but that is a domestic comedy.

Anyway, here’s a clip of the Paul Simon interview I quoted above, and there are other clips from the same interview available on YouTube if you are interested.