Matthew Butterick and A.I.’s Human Resistance ⇥ wired.com

Kate Knibbs, of Wired, profiled Matthew Butterick — who you probably know from his “Practical Typography” online book — about a series of lawsuits against major players in generative intelligence:

Yet when generative AI took off, he [Matthew Butterick] dusted off a long-dormant law degree specifically to fight this battle. He has now teamed up with Saveri as co-counsel on four separate cases, starting with a lawsuit filed in November 2022 against GitHub, claiming that the Microsoft subsidiary’s AI coding tool, Copilot, violates open-source licensing agreements. Now, the pair represent an array of programmers, artists, and writers, including comedian Sarah Silverman, who allege that generative AI companies are infringing upon their rights by training on their work without their consent.

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But, again, fair use is a nebulous concept. “Early on, we heard from opponents that the Authors Guild v. Google case would be determinative,” Butterick says. If the courts said Google could do it, why couldn’t they scrape millions of books too? He’s unconvinced. “The point of the Google Books project was to point you to the original books, right? ‘Here’s where you can find this book in a library.’ Generative AI doesn’t do any of that. It doesn’t point you to the original work. The opposite — it competes with that work.”

I am not a lawyer and so my opinion on this holds no weight. Even as a layperson, though, I am conflicted in how I feel about these massive and well-funded businesses scraping the sum total of human creativity and feeding it to machines in an attempt to replicate it.

In general, I am frustrated by the state of intellectual property law which too often benefits the richest and most powerful entities instead of individuals. We end up in ridiculous situations where works do not enter the public domain for many decades after the creator’s death; in the United States, public domain status can be avoided for around a century. But everything is a remix anyway, and we would not have the art of today without reinterpretation, sampling, referencing, or outright copying. Need an example? I copied the above copyrighted text above from the Wired article because I wanted to comment on and build upon it.

Generative “A.I.” tools are, in some ways, an extension of this tradition, except they also have significant corporate weight behind them. There is an obvious power imbalance when a large company copies an artist — either directly or indirectly — compared to the inverse. Apple’s website, for example, is routinely reinterpreted by other businesses — Pixelmator and DJI come to mind — as well as plenty of individuals, and I see no reason to be upset about that. It is very different when a big company like Zara rips off artists’ work. What some of these generative products enable feels to me like the Zara example.

If generative A.I. is deemed to be fair dealing or fair use without a need to compensate individuals or even ask for permission, a small amount of power can be restored to individuals by allowing them to opt out. Search engines already do this: they provide a mechanism to signal you do not want your website to be indexed. This should be true in all cases; it should not be a requirement that you provide training data to a large language model in order to use a social media application, for example.

For further reading, I thought Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada produced a good discussion paper regarding these issues. The government is asking for public feedback until December 4.