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Oh wow, just seeing this post made it to the front page. Founder of Sudowrite here, happy to answer questions.

libertine 5y ago
I don't mean to put on you the spot, but I have been wondering about this: Do you think that such tools will have the eyes of the regulators on top of them due to copyright issues, since the data used could have a lot of copyrighted material? I haven't yet made my mind about this: is the output original content, or just shuffled proprietary content?
- jamesjyu 5y ago
  (Caveat: IANAL) As far as I know the issue of copyright and AI generated content hasn’t been tested in the courts yet. There are two issues: 1) The author inadvertently uses output from GPT-3 that happens to be close enough to copyrighted material to be a problem. This is why we recommend to authors do two things: a) enter as much of their own original work to prompt Sudowrite and b) edit and incorporate the AI output organically into their work. The chance that GPT-3 outputs verbatim copyright work in that case is small. As we grow, we also plan to incorporate plagiarism checks in the background. 2) Someone could challenge the author’s copyright on a piece of work that was primarily written by GPT-3. This has not been tested in the courts, and I suspect it will come to head in the next few years. For me, the question of who owns copyright is dependent on how much work the author has done to the AI output (there are some parallels to the Monkey Selfie case [2]). For example, Stephen Marche (the author of the new yorker post from OP) also wrote a short story [1] using Sudowrite, in which he claims that 17.1% of the final words were from the AI. But of course, he has done non-trivial amounts of work to edit and incorporate those words and made it his own. So in this case, he def deserves ownership. All of our Sudowrite authors use the AI similarly in their process. However, what if an author uses vanilla GPT-3 with no humans int the loop to generate hundreds of biographies of famous people based on wikipedia entries? I don’t have a good answer to this. It shouldmay come down to how much the author has done to guide GPT-3 and/or pre-post-process it. Here’s further reading: http://rutgerslawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Robert-Denicola-Ex-Machina-69-Rutgers-UL-Rev-251-2016.pdf http://rutgerslawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Rober... https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/77599763.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/77599763.pdf [1] https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-thing-on-the-phone/ https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-thing-on-the-phone/ [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/12/550417823/-animal-rights-advocates-photographer-compromise-over-ownership-of-monkey-selfie https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/12/550417823...
  - libertine 5y ago
    Thank you for the insightful reply! Will definitely read more into it!

I don't mean to put on you the spot, but I have been wondering about this: Do you think that such tools will have the eyes of the regulators on top of them due to copyright issues, since the data used could have a lot of copyrighted material? I haven't yet made my mind about this: is the output original content, or just shuffled proprietary content?

jamesjyu 5y ago
(Caveat: IANAL) As far as I know the issue of copyright and AI generated content hasn’t been tested in the courts yet. There are two issues: 1) The author inadvertently uses output from GPT-3 that happens to be close enough to copyrighted material to be a problem. This is why we recommend to authors do two things: a) enter as much of their own original work to prompt Sudowrite and b) edit and incorporate the AI output organically into their work. The chance that GPT-3 outputs verbatim copyright work in that case is small. As we grow, we also plan to incorporate plagiarism checks in the background. 2) Someone could challenge the author’s copyright on a piece of work that was primarily written by GPT-3. This has not been tested in the courts, and I suspect it will come to head in the next few years. For me, the question of who owns copyright is dependent on how much work the author has done to the AI output (there are some parallels to the Monkey Selfie case [2]). For example, Stephen Marche (the author of the new yorker post from OP) also wrote a short story [1] using Sudowrite, in which he claims that 17.1% of the final words were from the AI. But of course, he has done non-trivial amounts of work to edit and incorporate those words and made it his own. So in this case, he def deserves ownership. All of our Sudowrite authors use the AI similarly in their process. However, what if an author uses vanilla GPT-3 with no humans int the loop to generate hundreds of biographies of famous people based on wikipedia entries? I don’t have a good answer to this. It shouldmay come down to how much the author has done to guide GPT-3 and/or pre-post-process it. Here’s further reading: http://rutgerslawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Robert-Denicola-Ex-Machina-69-Rutgers-UL-Rev-251-2016.pdf http://rutgerslawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Rober... https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/77599763.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/77599763.pdf [1] https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-thing-on-the-phone/ https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-thing-on-the-phone/ [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/12/550417823/-animal-rights-advocates-photographer-compromise-over-ownership-of-monkey-selfie https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/12/550417823...
- libertine 5y ago
  Thank you for the insightful reply! Will definitely read more into it!