This is something of a follow-up on the last post. It was observed to me that some might object to uploading their dissertations or other published scholarship to an AI because that’s just a corporation making money off of their work.
I guess if I was worried about that I wouldn’t have also uploaded the chapter I used and included it in the post. But if you are concerned about that I would recommend the following:
- Obviously you wouldn’t want to be a public scholar, even one as modest as myself with a blog now 20 years old and with well over 1M words of my writing on it.
- You’d also not want to publish in any open access publishing scheme as I have sought to do my entire career.
- And it should go without saying that you aren’t otherwise hanging your ass out in the world on social media or using a search engine or otherwise clicking about on the internet.
Of course you can publish behind a paywall and limit access to your work. That will ensure Elsevier profits from your work instead of OpenAI. That’s a choice. Then again, any college student with database access can download your article in PDF from and upload it to ChatGPT or wherever and ask for a summary. So what are you gonna do?
There’s more fun stuff here though. I’m not even going to attempt to discuss copyright law. That’s not my field. I will say that there is some irony in humanities academics invoking the Mickey Mouse law to protect their own work, even though 99.99999%+ of us have virtually no economic interest in the copyright of our work. (Oh, and btw, read the fine print on the rights you signed away when you published.) The price of being public is that you can’t control what happens next.
I would guess that objections over AI are really about different concerns. The most obvious is that academics don’t like tech bros or their politics. They specifically object to the way AI is being developed. That’s fine. I don’t disagree with those sentiments. The second is that academics view AI as a threat to higher education, particularly to teaching. Again, for good reason.
I see a different matter of concern. In the humanities, particularly in English Studies, decades ago we built the symptomatic reading on top of the intentional fallacy and supported it with the author function. We can (should) recognize the historical, market-driven imperatives that lead to the invention of copyright. We know about the Romantic concept of the author. We have charted the death of the subject. We have built careers on hegemony as an overdetermining force. And so on.
To turn around and say “I wrote this. It belongs to me.” should be deserving of at least an eye roll. I know we put a lot of time and effort into producing scholarship. There’s no doubt that labor was mine. I know. I was there. But does someone messing with the product of my labor, change the value of the work I did? Maybe in terms of dollars (or more accurately a fraction of a dollar) but not otherwise. Does it matter that colleagues would create a PDF of a chapter of my book and use it over and again in their courses? Not really. I mean it makes me happy. Do you think I care about the $50/yr I’m missing out on?
I think the anxiety has to do with machine reading (and writing). What does it mean that a machine can produce a reasonable facsimile of my work? I imagine weavers were asking this question in the 19th century. Not that the answer is the same today, but I bet they were asking.
Imagine writing and uploading a document to ChatGPT that fundamentally altered the texts it generated so that all the texts started to imitate you. Are you concerned that your work will add too much value to the product or that it won’t? That it turns out all our works amount to little more than a rounding error in its generative calculations, that we are just cogs in a Hobbesian leviathan after all.
Alex Reid 