Beyond Fair Use

I read with interest Brian Merchant’s piece in the LA Times which mentions the open letter to the US Congress that I signed and participated in the drafting of. I won’t go too much into a critique of it here, but my position broadly is that artists of all kinds ought to be included in high-level AI policy discussions, including both artists who are against all or certain aspects of the technology, and those who embrace it, or aspects of it. Artists are not a homogenous group by any means, but we offer important counterpoint societally that other groups don’t in the same way or quality.

Despite the framing of the article, that original letter referenced by LA Times didn’t mention Fair Use or copyright all, but my subsequent personal response to the US Copyright Office & its Canadian counterpart’s public inquiry regarding AI and copyright obviously did extensively. I am (not a lawyer, but…) pretty sure that under US law, training AI on copyrighted data is most of the time Fair Use. In my eyes, the direction the court proceedings are heading seem to support that position.

But I also don’t think that because I support the idea that AI companies should run rampant and do anything they want (my books explore fictional scenarios of what happens when we allow them to do exactly that btw); quite the contrary, as you can see from the AI Terms of Service that I wrote (with help from AI) and sent as a policy document to the Canadian federal government and political parties. My beliefs run much deeper than that.

In reality, I am a tremendous critic of technology, a Certified Super Complainer™, making use of AI in order to critique AI. I don’t even own a smart phone or use social media — I hate how these technologies make me feel and the way they negatively reinforce endless status-seeking and influence-chasing in human relationships, not to mention addictive behaviors. At the same time, I cautiously embrace certain aspects of generative AI, because I believe it represents the most fascinating and boundary-pushing artistic technology of our time.  

Philosophically, my sympathies go much farther than Fair Use: I am probably something more like a ‘Universalist Library-ist’ who believes we ought to have universal access to all knowledge available to everyone (plus, you know, healthcare, but that’s another story). I am a believer in the applicability here of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically Article 19 of which asserts the right to “seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” To me, that ought to include AI as a legitimate tool for accessing, creating, and sharing information.

In one of my AI-assisted books, The Continuity Codex, a fictional League of Earth Libraries deploys an AI trained on the entirety of knowledge from all the world’s libraries – accessible on a thumb drive – before being driven underground by an authoritarian dictator bent on controlling all of information and history by bombing member libraries to rubble.

I do think that AI companies locking access to knowledge services which are based, in essence, on data extracted from humanity at large is not really a good look. Instead of having to pay for the privilege of accessing it, we should all be reaping dividends from this common inheritance of humanity that AI represents, and working towards finding the best forms and uses of these technologies that make our lives actively better, instead of enmesh us ever deeper into the snares of technology.

We absolutely deserve to live in a world where human well being and the artistic creations that support it are prioritized. I don’t think we have that yet given the current state of things, and our laws which undoubtedly support the status quo; but I hold out hope that we can still make decisions and take actions, individually and collectively which could bring us little by little closer to that world.