The quill and the algorithm: What happens when AI meets IP in the world of publishing?
Last weekend, ChatGPT and I created “Julianne Hartley”, a charming AI-author stirring hearts with "Whispers in the Mist”, first chapter published on Wattpad. (Full story in these three posts https://www.mikecbetts.com/julianne-hartley .)
I’m not planning to really manage an AI-author, but it was a really interesting ‘thought-experiment’ - how easy it is to create AI-generated fiction? How long would it take? How good would it be?
Well, it was easier than I imagined, and the results far better. It’s not going to worry serious established authors - but I can see it being used at scale by a lot of aspiring authors, especially those more interested in monetisation than craft.
So this whole experiment got me thinking - what about IP? If an AI creates a literary work, in the broadest use of that term, does it deserve and will it receive the same legal protection as a human author?
Here are ChatGPT’s thoughts on the likely scenarios…
📚 Tech-Savvy Publishers like Tor and Orbit could blaze the trail, marrying their speculative fiction expertise with AI’s possibilities. Academic powerhouses like Springer might not be far behind, leveraging AI to distill research into compelling narratives.
🖋️ Futurist Authors such as Neal Stephenson may soon share credits with AI, while Indie Author-Publishers could harness AI's capabilities, democratizing storytelling even further.
⚖️ On the legal front, IP Law Firms with digital dexterity, like Finnegan or Fish & Richardson, are poised to craft the frameworks that will govern AI's creative outputs. As entertainment law firms navigate the rights of virtual actors, so too will they charter the rights of AI-authors.
💼 Tech Giants like Google and Amazon have both the motive and the means to pioneer AI-authored publications. And when a bestseller penned by an AI lands on virtual shelves, or a courtroom gavel falls on an AI copyright case, the landscape will shift irrevocably.
It feels too early to accurately predict how this will play out, but based on a study in the United States in May, of the 23% of authors who reported using AI in their work, 47% were using it as a grammar tool, 29% used AI to brainstorm plot ideas and characters, and under 10% used artificial intelligence to generate the text of their work.
But if you scale that 10% (of 23%) across all authors, that already feels significant, and that was just a few months after ChatGPT became publicly available - I bet that number is a lot higher now.
