GRAFTON, Massachusetts — After two octogenarian friends named Nick discovered that ChatGPT may have stolen and misappropriated their life’s research, they enlisted their son-in-law to sue the company behind the artificial intelligence chatbot.
Veteran journalists Nicholas Gage, 84, and Nicholas Basbanez, 81, who live near each other in the same Massachusetts town, have each been reporting, writing and penning books for decades.
Gage chronicled his tragic family story and journey to find the truth behind his mother’s death in a bestselling memoir that led to John Malkovich playing him in the 1985 film Eleni. Basbanez used his skills as a daily newspaper reporter to write a widely read book on literary culture.
Basbanes was the first of the two to play around with the AI chatbot, and while he thought it was great, he found it riddled with falsehoods and unclear attribution. The friends sympathized, and filed a lawsuit earlier this year, trying to represent a group of authors who claim their copyrighted works have been “systematically stolen” by OpenAI and its business partner, Microsoft.
“Yes,” Basbanez added as they both peered at Gage’s bookshelf, “we worked too hard on this epic.”
Now their suit has been joined in a broader lawsuit seeking class-action status led by celebrities such as John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and “Game of Thrones” novelist George R.R. Martin, and is being heard before the same New York federal judge who is hearing similar copyright infringement claims from media outlets including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and Mother Jones.
What all these lawsuits have in common is the allegation that OpenAI, with the help of Microsoft funding and computing power, has ingested vast amounts of human-written text to “train” its AI chatbot to generate human-like text, without giving permission or compensation to the people who originally wrote the work.
“Why should I pay for it if I can get it for free?” Gage said. “But this is extremely unfair and extremely harmful to the written word.”
OpenAI and Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment this week, but they are fighting the allegations in court and publicly. Other AI companies are similarly facing lawsuits from authors but also visual artists, music labels and other creators who claim that generative AI profits were built through misappropriation.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleiman defended AI industry practices at the Aspen Ideas Festival last month, arguing that training AI systems on content already publicly available on the internet is protected by the “fair use” doctrine of U.S. copyright law.
“Since the ’90s, the social contract around that content has been that it’s fair use,” Suleiman says. “Anyone can copy it, recreate it with it, reproduce it with it. It was freeware, so to speak.”
Suleiman said it was more of a “gray area” in a situation where some news organizations and others have made it clear they don’t want tech companies to “scrape” content from their websites. “I think that will be resolved in court,” he said.
Those lawsuits are still in the discovery phase and are scheduled to continue until 2025. In the meantime, some people who believe their jobs are threatened by AI business practices are trying to strike private deals to force tech companies to pay to license the archives. Others are fighting back.
“Someone had to go out and do actual research, interviewing real people in the real world, reviewing documents and figuring out how to synthesize those documents and express them in clear, simple language,” said Frank Pine, editor in chief of MediaNews Group, publisher of dozens of newspapers including the Denver Post, Orange County Register and St. Paul Pioneer Press, which sued OpenAI in April.
“These are all real jobs that AI can’t do,” Pine says. “An AI app is never going to leave the office, go downtown to a fire, and put out that fire.”
The Massachusetts lawsuit they filed in January was deemed too similar to one filed late last year and was joined in a consolidated lawsuit filed by other nonfiction writers, as well as fiction writers represented by the Authors Guild. That means Gage and Basvanes are unlikely to testify in the upcoming trial in Manhattan federal court. But nearing the end of their careers, the pair thought it was important to stand up for the future of their work.
Traumatized by the shooting death of his mother during the Greek civil war in 1948, Mr. Gage fled Greece at age 9 and joined his father in Worcester, Massachusetts, not far from where he lives now. Encouraged by a teacher, he took up writing and built a reputation as a dogged investigative reporter, pursuing organized crime and political corruption for The New York Times and other newspapers.
Basvanes, a Greek-American journalist, had heard of and admired the older, “savvy reporter,” when, in the early 1970s, he got an unexpected phone call at his desk at the Worcester Evening Gazette, a voice calling him with a Greek accent.
“You were like a talent scout,” Basbanez said. “We developed a friendship. I mean, I’ve known him longer than my wife and we’ve been married 49 years.”
Though Basbanes doesn’t dig into his stories like Gage did, he says it can take days to craft a great piece and verify all the facts it contains. It took years of research and visits to archives and auction houses to write “A Gentle Madness,” his 1995 book about the art of book collecting from ancient Egypt to the present.
“I’m pleased that A Gentle Madness is in some 1,400 libraries,” Basbanez said. “Every writer’s goal is to be read, but you also need to write to make money, to put food on the table, to support your family, to make a living. And as long as it’s your intellectual property, you have a right to be fairly compensated for your efforts.”
Gage took a huge professional risk by quitting his job at The Times to find out who was responsible for his mother’s death, leaving him with $160,000 in debt.
“I tracked down everyone who was in the village when my mother was killed,” he said, “and they were all over Eastern Europe. So it cost a lot of money and time, and there was no guarantee that we’d ever get the money back. But when you commit yourself to something as important as my mother’s story, the risk is huge and the effort is huge.”
In other words, ChatGPT doesn’t let you do that, but what Gage worries is that ChatGPT might make it harder for others to do it.
“Publishing will disappear. Newspapers will disappear. Talented young people will stop writing,” Gage said. “I’m 84 years old. I don’t know if this problem will be solved in my lifetime, but it’s important that a solution is found.”
