Canadian artist wants Anthropic AI lawsuit corrected Tim Boucher, a Canadian artist, author, and AI activist, sent a letter to the San Francisco judge overseeing an authors' lawsuit against AI firm Anthropic to object to the way the legal filing characterizes his work. The complaint, which accuses Anthropic of violating authors' copyrights, says that the company's Claude model " …
If that's true then he isn't a writer at all. 97 books in one year works out at less than 4 days for each one.
As someone who has several books published whose content all came from my own hand (with absolutely no AI involvement, whatsoever) I know how long it can take to properly write and edit a book, and it's far in excess of 4 days! My latest book, which is currently being printed, had its germination back in October 2022.
So, a pox on all those who call themselves authors but are really no more than manipulators of AI.
From the other article, the books being written don't have that many words. Two to five thousand words is a short story. The only question is, without reading them, whether the 40-140 images are making this part of the plot, effectively a short graphic novel.
In his defense, writing a bunch of short stories is a very different thing to writing a bunch of novels. I can't know how much effort has gone into any of the short stories without reading them, and I'm not paying to do that. I'd still think that writing a hundred of them in a year probably means there's not that much in them, but it is conceivable for an author to do that by hand and therefore conceivable that someone could use GPT to generate one, then clean it up to be something worth reading. That doesn't mean that's what he has done. There are lots of people who put in some prompts and sell whatever text comes back, and just because he claims not to be one of them doesn't prove he's not.
Indeed. Now compare this to Lionel Fanthorpe, who in his days as a boiler room pulp author wrote 89 books averaging between 40k and 50k words in a span of three years without AI doing any of the work for him. The good reverend would be the first to admit that they were terrible, but they were at least his own work. Boucher isn't even an impressive hack.
‘"The contents of my books come from my imagination and I use AI tools to realize that vision’
And these AI tools were trained on other peoples works.
If it's not written, edited, and proofed by humans (or human) then I'm not even interested. I don't want to read some complicated predictive text, no matter how much input a human has into the query that generates that text. Let's hear it for real works by real authors!
One book every four days? Front!
> and I use AI tools to realize that vision, just like I might in other cases use a paintbrush and canvas, or linoleum block cuts to do the same.
And we know how long you have to practice with paintbrushes and lino cutting in order to create something good with them. Don't act all surprised when anyone judges your books on the same basis, how much time and effort you put into learning how use the "AI".
Heck, real masters of painting have created their own media and pigments, whilst others artists have learnt how to fold and grind their own chisels for just the right line in the lino blocks: how much time has this guy put into writing an AI model?
> I do not falsely attribute my books to other authors.
Someone want to tell him that he has that around the wrong way?
It'd sit better if he just claimed it was all a performance art piece.
Very interesting article and interview! The Newsweek report link (given also by t245t above) adds interesting items: the "books" are 2,000 to 5,000 words each (like novels; and like TFA's 2,859 words), and generated $2,000 in total income for the author (Boucher). Still, 97 of those in one year could be a world record, compared to Barbara Cartland's 23 a year (total of 723) -- though computer-assisted writing may need to be its own distinct category (triple-checked for originality, and better sense than amanfromMars1; Plus: a journalist may write 200 articles a year ...).
The issue that the Bartz-Graeber-Johnson lawsuit against Anthropic might mischaracterize Boucher's work as part of its supporting arguments is fascinating imho, and I hope we get to hear more about how that eventually pans out.
Boucher makes interesting points that bodacious language models (with generous grammars, per this AC) might produce, on the one hand, "outputs [that] sometimes tend toward the vanilla", books that "weren't memorable for me", and "answers [that] fell very short and were extremely flat and weird and boring". Their positives, on the other hand, were in providing an "interrogative way of working", help to "think more logically [and] organize those thoughts and communicate them", and an ability "to rapidly iterate on the results until it matches my vision". In other words, it seems the tech, on its own, tended to trek in the direction of spongiform encephalopathy, but a skilled wrangler could right that course, onwards to a much more satisfying BBQ outcome.
If the positives can be had without producing verbatim copies of prior work, text with a style that obviously pirates another author's, content infused with PIIs and trade secrets that violate GDPR, or a brown-out-causing energy consumption that rivals Autumn of the Patriarch electric chairs, then might there not be hope yet for these plus-sized models of language ... (that share no similarity with intelligence, nor language)?
That's the big question IMHO. Butcher ain't got the physionomy of an Allende, Asimov, Christie, Fannon, Garcia-Marquez, Hemingway, Kerouac, or Orwell, with associated drink, smoke, inspired faraway gaze, crazy hair ... His appearance reminds me more of a woodsman version of Adam Glasser (Seymore Butts) ... but maybe that's how writers look nowadays? Can't judge a book by its cover!
I spent a couple months working at a tech site to make ends meet and I remember being able to churn out several thousand words per week that I was happy to have attached to my name. Now, my memory could be overstating my actual productivity.
So out of curiosity, I checked the last 4 days of articles from Thomas Claburn, excluding the ~2600 word interview itself, and did a word count. Came to a bit over 3,000 words. 3,011 to be precise, but it's possibly copy/paste introduced some artifacts. Note that included a weekend.
So it looks like our fair Reg staff can more than match this git's output while actually doing research and writing it themselves.
In my, admittedly limited, experience, writing is a lot like code in that speed of words written is a bad metric and that that number is highly variable. Writing documentation, for instance, is something that comes easily to me. I know what this program does because I've been using it for weeks, so now I have to write down a description. I can do so at length. I may still need a review to point out where I've been unclear on something or where I've made a mistake in my haste, but it isn't very difficult and few changes are needed.
Many other types of writing are more complicated because they also include a lot of planning and review. Well-written fiction should be one of those things. It's not just having an idea of an interesting thing for the characters to do and writing down the idea, but you have to make the words paint a picture or you end up with some very boring prose, you have to include sufficient description so that the reader understands the image you planned, and you have to tie that scene to all the rest of the plot. If you mess up on the last part, then at best you end up with a book that's way too disconnected, and at worst your scene contradicts something important and breaks the reader's interest. There is no canonical program out there for you to check your writing against, and therefore you have to do a lot more work. I would not expect people doing different forms of writing to have any similar number for words written per hour of work, and in fact I would expect that different authors, even in the same area, would also have very different numbers.
What's in my books comes from my imagination, and I use AI tools to realize that vision, just like I might in other cases use a paintbrush and canvas, or linoleum block cuts to do the same.
That sounds legit - just yesterday I set up my easel and canvas, got my palette, paints, and brushes ready and told them all to paint me a picture of a bunch of flowers and they did fuck all nothing because that's not how the tools of creativity work.
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