The Ghost in the Machine Sleeps Tonight
Each new day brings fresh reports of developments in artificial intelligence—and deteriorations of the ethical boundaries within the widespread usage of this seemingly limitless technology. As of this writing, more than ninety lawsuits have been filed by creators, including many writers, against AI companies for copyright infringement. The most high-profile of them (so far), brought against Anthropic for its illegal training of the large language model Claude, is nearing completion, with payments to publishers and authors expected to begin in the fall. With that two-year-plus legal saga nearly over, we can all direct our attention to another class-action copyright infringement lawsuit, filed in May, that alleges Meta and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, illegally used millions of copyrighted works to train the AI program Llama. At the same time, there is a level of panic and paranoia surrounding the publication of AI-generated books that reached its zenith (so far) when Hachette canceled the publication of the horror novel Shy Girl after allegations, confirmed by a thorough and thoroughly belated review of the book—presumably using AI to detect AI-generated text—that its author, Mia Ballard, relied on the technology to write it. Ballard has denied the allegations, saying that someone she hired to edit a previously self-published version of the novel had been the one to use AI. Such a violation—and the near-certainty that it is just the tip of the iceberg—prompted the Authors Guild to launch a Human Authored certification process, complete with a stamp of authenticity for authors who want to publicly proclaim that a human being did, in fact, write the text using only the limited technology of their very own brain. This seems a good time to mention that the words you are reading were written by me, with no help from AI (beyond the spelling and grammar checks ubiquitous in word-processing software), and that the author agreement every contributor to this magazine must sign includes a clause affirming that they have not used any AI tools, software, or generators, including generative AI technology, to write, edit, or otherwise produce the writing we intend to publish. Beyond that, of course, I trust simply reading this magazine provides a strong indication of its human origin. I challenge anyone to read “To Grieve, to Mourn, to Sing, to Feel,” Destiny O. Birdsong’s stirring profile of poet Phillip B. Williams, and believe otherwise. Keep writing, fellow mortals.
