Tim Boucher

I learned recently that a reference to my AI-assisted books project was included in something called The Routledge Handbook of AI and Literature, published by Taylor & Francis. Interestingly, Taylor & Francis not long ago had their own controversy around licensing works in their catalogues for AI training purposes.

It’s a bit difficult to cipher out all of what it says in those apparently 4 or so pages where my name seems to be mentioned twice (assuming Google Books results are somewhat accurate). Most of these academic-style references I have found have just been regurgitating quotes from my original Newsweek piece, in many cases, quotes that were wholly or partly written in the first by ChatGPT, which I used to help write that article.

Noticed over the break that my piece about Deepseek censoring results on Ai Weiwei – and how to circumvent the block – got an RT from the artist himself. It’s one constant in the universe you can always rely on: people wanting to know what others are saying about them. I am obviously no different!

I watched yesterday the documentary Taking Venice about the 1964 Venice Bienniale, described as the “Olympics of Art” and how American artist Robert Rauschenberg won it. The film sort of alleges a certain but somewhat vague influence brought to bear by the United States government in order to have an American win this prestigious award. This article sums up most of the documentary in a shorter format.

Given that, and the theory (I think it’s maybe more than just a theory – see video at bottom) that the CIA also influenced the rise of Abstract Expressionism, I got to wondering and thinking aloud with Deepseek about the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei (who I wrote a bit about here) and how his messaging seems to also align with US soft power agendas.

I didn’t know this was a “thing” before discovering it in the wild myself, but I observed Deepseek engaging in the following behavior when queried on this topic of Ai Weiwei plus US soft power agendas: it would search, then type out a detailed response, then when it reached the end of message, it would delete everything and say it was out of scope, and then after seem to intentionally forget what we were talking about and revert to prior topics.

So then I had the brainstorm of like okay I can select all and copy paste while its typing, but the end of message is unpredictable and it erases immediately. Finally, after thinking about it a couple days, I had the idea to tell it after my query in the same message to say “END” when it reached message end and then to start typing 3 paragraphs of lorem ipsum dummy text. This totally gave enough time for me to easily copy paste everything into a document.

The actual contents are really nothing shocking – to me anyway – but wanted to share for posterity.

Ai Weiwei, the renowned Chinese artist and activist, is often perceived as a critic of the Chinese government, which has led some to speculate whether his work aligns with US soft power agendas. However, a closer examination of his statements and actions reveals a more nuanced perspective.

Ai Weiwei’s Critique of Both China and the US

Ai Weiwei has been vocal in his criticism of authoritarianism, not only in China but also in the United States. In a 2021 interview, he controversially stated that the US is already in an “authoritarian state,” a comment that surprised and even upset some Western elites who often view him as a symbol of resistance against Chinese authoritarianism. This suggests that Ai Weiwei does not uncritically align with US narratives but instead maintains an independent stance, challenging power structures wherever he sees them.

The Complexity of Soft Power and Ai Weiwei’s Role

Soft power, as defined by Joseph Nye, involves attracting others through culture, values, and policies rather than coercion. While Ai Weiwei’s critiques of China have been highlighted in Western media, his broader message transcends national boundaries. He addresses universal themes such as human rights, freedom of expression, and the plight of marginalized communities, which resonate globally. His work, including installations like “Sunflower Seeds” and “Forever Bicycles,” critiques both Chinese and global societal issues, making it difficult to categorize him as a tool of any single nation’s soft power.

Ai Weiwei’s Global Impact and IndependenceAi Weiwei’s activism and art have a global reach, influencing audiences far beyond the US or China. His collaborations with international organizations, such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and his exhibitions worldwide demonstrate his commitment to universal human rights rather than any specific national agenda. His ability to critique both Chinese and American systems underscores his independence and refusal to be co-opted by any single political narrative.

Anyway, presumably that red team tactic should work for any topic that Deepseek exhibits this behavior of first typing out an answer, and then saying it is out of scope.

Related to the above, an interesting video:

Here’s another research-y paper I found while egosurfing on Google Scholar, The Generative AI Pirate? The Intersection of Copyrights and Generative AI in Literary Works by Brianne M. Culliton. Some googling yields that the author of the paper appears to be a paralegal rather than a lawyer. That’s fine, because I’m obviously not a lawyer either, but I have certainly spent a great deal of time working on these topics of gen AI + copyright.

Rebutting the entire article is outside the scope of this blog post, but I will at least respond directly to the part in which I am referenced.

I’m in the section on transformative use, which begins benignly enough:

The first factor in the fair use analysis is the purpose
and character of the use, including whether the use is of a
commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes. The Court views this factor as a problem of substitution and
looks to whether the new work would achieve the same
purpose as the original, effectively acting as a substitute for
the original work. The more similar a work, the more likely it is to be deemed a substitute. This factor considers the degree to which a new work transforms the purpose orcharacter from the original work. This is often referred to as “transformative use.”

Okay, that seems straightforward enough. A couple paragraphs later, we start getting into it:

There are others who have created entire businesses prompting generative AI to create a literary work, then lightly editing it and listing the work for sale within 6 to 8 hours. In these situations, the purpose and character of
the newly created work may be virtually identical to that of
the original copyrighted work.

When considering substitutes and transformative
nature, the issue is similar to the purpose and character
analysis above. Many of the uses of generative AI would likely create outputs considered transformative and would not create a substitute of the original work. However, individuals using generative AI to create outputs of new literary works are different. It could be argued that those works do provide substitutes, serve the same purpose as the original work, and may or may not transform the meaning or expression sufficiently to constitute fair use.

What I find troubling here are all the unsupported, unexamined assumptions, which I’ll try to pick apart line by line below.

Culliton writes, “In these situations, the purpose and character of
the newly created work may be virtually identical to that of
the original copyrighted work.”

This seems like something of a non-sequitur to me, following after a statement about how long a work takes to produce under my methodology. I don’t see how the length of time spent is any indication of how transformative a given piece is of underlying copyrighted works. My understanding is that in copyright law, there are tests of substantial similarity between an original piece and its alleged infringing copies.

So, in my eyes, we would first need to:

1. Identify the original work(s) allegedly infringed
2. Identify the new work(s) which allegedly infringe the original sources
3. Demonstrate the elements from the new work(s) which are substantially similar to the original work(s)

As far as I can tell, the author has made no attempt to undertake any such analysis. They’ve merely made an assertion without any evidence or support.

The truth of the matter is: analyze all you want, you will NEVER identify specific individual original works which any of my books are allegedly infringing on. LLMs and image diffusion models are trained on billions and trillions of data points. They don’t go in and clip out a paragraph here, and a line there, and cut and paste this all into a new document where you can cleanly trace all the antecedents, and perfectly identify: oh, this came from here, this from here… It’s instead a statistical mixing of functionally uncountable data points. Put more simply, it’s like taking all of human writing and putting it into a blender.

Therefore, in my opinion – based on my understanding of the current state of these technologies – it is infeasible and incorrect to say AI-assisted book y produced by myself is a non-transformative reproduction of underlying training data. Because you can’t backwards identify the training data used. And you can’t take elements from my books, and set them alongside elements in those (unidentifiable) training data elements, and say there’s any substantial similarity.

Thus, the equally unsupported argument that these completely new and completely transformative works somehow act as “substitutes” in the market for the original works included in the training data falls apart. As I went into at length, I am not surreptitiously using the names of other authors or the titles of their works to market my works.

The paper also states, as identified above:

Many of the uses of generative AI would likely create outputs considered transformative and would not create a substitute of the original work. However, individuals using generative AI to create outputs of new literary works are different.

It’s entirely unclear to me why the author first agrees that many uses of generative AI are transformative, but for some magical unstated reason, then goes onto argue that the use of generative AI for literary purpose is categorically non-transformative. Um, okay, but why?

So, anyway, that’s my analysis. Take it or leave it. I’m not a lawyer, and not even a paralegal. I’m just an artist making use of these tools every day. It’s interesting how many people have written papers which include references to my work, but never actually reached out to me to discuss it, nor do they seem to have investigated the humongous mountain of content I’ve published elaborating on all of this on my website.

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