Sarah Silverman vs. AI

Sarah Silverman recently said she is suing OpenAI and others for copyright infringement among other charges. She claims that ChatGPT uses unauthorized sources to gather data from her and then uses it to do things like say, summarize her books. Is this true? Are generative AI companies IP theft bandits cranking out recycled text from Silverman’s comedy? Personally, I just use ChatGPT to write some stock emails, create a proposal paragraph on occasion, or create some thought starters when I am dry of creative ideas. So far not a single Silverman gag has appeared in my AI flow.

So what is Silverman doing here? Is she saying that any text, prose, photo, joke, book, audio, video, or illustration that has been borrowed from another source has to be monetized and the original creator should be paid? Should I have to pay any author who’ve I’ve quoted a phrase from when sending a pitch? Should Andy Warhol’s estate owe Campbell Soup money for his silkscreens? Should Shepard Fairey compensate the family of professional wrestler Andre the Giant for using his brand and image to launch his lucrative art career? Should SNL have to pay Donald Trump every time they spoof him? I bet ya the Donald would love that but it isn’t the world we live in and never has been.?If these types of lawsuits actually take hold and create a precedent then political cartoons, parodies, and memes will be at risk of disappearing. It could collapse parts of the content universe as we know it. I am unsure of her final goal considering how much we borrow content every day just to entertain each other. So let’s think about WHY this is all coming to a head right now. How did digital technology become troublesome? Let’s go to the way back machine…

Let’s go all the way back to Napster.

For those of you too young to remember, Napster was an early method to upload music illegally from CDs and share it across an online community. I was a musician at the time it launched and saw the problem. F*cking hell, there was my album that I was trying to sell into local record stores of my band’s newest music. It was being passed around on Napster scot-free! It was disastrous for the music industry and then later the film/video market as well when other torrent sites emerged. Did the government get in there and start to legislate? Nope. Digital media was exploding and DC’s attitude was laissez-faire. As long as people were making money, they didn't care. Eventually, it all caught up to our legislators and they started going after small-time digital pirates as if they were the problem. But the genie was out. That pickle would never become a cucumber again.?

And to make matters more complicated, Friendster, Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Youtube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Tumblr, Twitter, and personal cloud data storage all appeared and the ability to share large file format IP unabated at scale to millions of people was unleashed.?

So why didn’t the good people of the internet community say, “Well enough is enough! Let’s get these artists and creators their money!”

Because they didn’t care. In fact, after years of seeing the media industry reap massive profits while the rest of the world was subject to the whims of ever more turbulent economic waters, they became outright giddy about it.?It was like stealing your neighbor's cable service on a massive scale while shrouded in total anonymity.

There is also the idea that many people think that we shouldn’t gatekeep helpful data in any context. Most people never had access to tech tools and proprietary information to make themselves more valuable in a creative, technical, or academic job market before digital media without an expensive education. There were those who had talent but whose parents could never afford a guitar or didn’t have the time or space to rehearse. The kids who stole Krylon cans and painted on subway walls rather than canvas because they couldn't set up an easel and drip Cadmium Red all over their family’s cramped NYC apartment floor. The kids scrawling poetry in marble notebooks without a way to print it legibly who didn't know how to type. The math wizards who didn’t have the hardware and software that could take their skills and make algorithms out of it. See the majority of the world was stuck being told to go get some boring job, forget creativity, forget innovation, forget your dreams and ideas because they would never materialize because of where you started in the economic chain. Creativity and innovation were not in your stars kiddo.?

So here comes digital. Here come cheap computers. Here come cell phones with web browsers. Here come extensive online libraries of books, graphics, code, video, art, animation, and history. Lots of it is crap. Lots of it is also gold. Think about just GitHub alone. Imagine how quickly computer science would have progressed outside of academia and big corporations if, at the dawn of the internet, there was an easily accessible cheap or free depository of code every day people with some programming skill could have shared.

Digital tech brought a massive cache of knowledge, content, education, and inspirational creative history that the well-off had always had access to while the have-nots weren’t able to acquire until then. So before AI IP piracy was even a conversation, people had been downloading, sharing, co-opting, sampling, collaging, mashing up, and yes stealing content for a few decades now gleefully, with no remorse. This helped many learn and develop skills, ideas, and inspiration they would have needed a degree to have gained beforehand.

So where does that put us??

Look we all know stealing is bad. We are brought up with that in every culture. But what else do people see? They see our leaders lie, cheat, and steal their way to success. They see generational wealth breed success without merit or talent entering the equation. They see shortcuts as a path to personal autonomy.

People see Sarah Silverman - a wealthy white woman, raised in the suburbs of New Hampshire, from a well-off family, a woman who started her career by crafting “casually racist” gags, who went to expensive schools like NYU hemming and hawing about ChatGPT, a tool that is helping millions get ahead by simplifying day to day drudgery. And now she is telling us don't use AI because it hurts her personal finances?

Is she serious??

AGAIN I will say it - we need to make laws and legislate and manage our tech. We need to protect content creators. But why do we always hear about the risks of new tech from…

1. People in the government who have to ask idiotic questions like “So, how [does Facebook] sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?,” when their own party ran ads on that platform.
2. People at competitive tech companies that have something to lose from emerging products. Especially those that are now butt-sore because they weren’t allowed to play in that sandbox.
3. People that can’t see beyond their own tone-deaf entitlement and income brackets.

You know that quote in Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way?” So does the internet. You want to control the net? Have fun with that. Whatever you come up with, someone else will create a way to work around it at the speed of thought, legally or otherwise.

So good luck Sarah. That is one mighty big genie you are trying to fit back into that lamp. I think it will be harder than you expected.?

What do you all think? I’d love to know. Does Silverman have a case? Is AI rushing us toward an IP piracy apocalypse? Am I drunk on the AI Kool Aid or will this tech help us become more successful as a species?