Good Riddance, Sam Altman
A leading figure in the war on literature
“We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…”
“Regurgitated culture is no replacement for human art.”
“Humans doing the hard jobs on minimum wage while the robots write poetry and paint is not the future I wanted.”
Sam Altman has just been fired as CEO of OpenAI for allegedly lying to his company board. The details of this firing are still unknown. Altman might be out, but the damage he has wrought onto writers and literature will continue. Throughout his tenure as CEO, Altman showed not even the slightest hint of sympathy with the writers who were most affected by his creation, ChatGPT. While many voices in the mainstream will praise him as a tech genius who changed our world, I and many others will denounce him as a cultural arsonist.
The Enemy of Literature
ChatGPT was first launched by OpenAI in 2022. It trains on millions of words of text to generate human-like writing in response to specific prompts from the user. This is hardly the first software to answer replies in a user-friendly way. AskJeeves and Clippy were clear progenitors. What makes ChatGPT so remarkable is that it can write human-sounding plots, poetry, essays, screenplays, and song lyrics. Now the writing is not particularly great, but it will get better. Technology rarely stays frozen in time. The writing is also human enough to fool even the most skilled readers. As you might imagine, the impact on human writers has been immediate.
There are over 200 ebooks on Kindle which have been written using AI tools like ChatGPT. It is estimated that AI users can complete one ebook a month. One tech worker used AI to publish a children’s book in only 72 hours. Not only is it impossible for human writers to compete with this, but human-based writing could easily be crowded out by machine-based slush. Not only will this devastate the self-publishing industry, but it will also make it harder for newer writers to break into the field.
We need to look at what’s been happening to the short story magazines like Clarkesworld and Asimov’s Science-Fiction. Short stories have historically been invaluable for science-fiction and fantasy writers to get attention. What happens when that spotlight is stolen by a chatbot? For the first time since its founding in 2006, Clarkesworld had to temporarily close submissions in 2023 after receiving more than 500 AI-based submissions. None of the AI language detectors used by Clarkesworld were reliable enough to differentiate between the AI and the human submissions. Shiela Williams, the editor at Asimov’s, has found as easier time of sifting through the AI submissions, but this amount of extra work still steals energy away from reading human submissions: “It takes the same amount of time to download a submission, open it, and look at it. And I’d rather be spending that time on the legitimate submissions.”
This year, writer and publishing expert, Jane Friedman, found to her horror that there were several AI made books listed on Goodreads and Amazon as authored by her. Only after complaining about the issue on social media did Amazon and Goodreads remove the titles. Amazon had initially refused to do so. You can expect more of this in the future.
Keep in mind amidst all of this that writers in the U.S. are making less money than ever before. In 2018, the Author’s Guild (AG) found that writers make a median of $6,080, which is a 42% decrease from 2009. Even when singling out only full-time writers, they still make a median of only $20,300, which is still well below the U.S. poverty line. Furthermore, the AG also found that author revenue from books declined by over 50% from 2009. The release of ChatGPT is an attempt to strangle and suffocate a struggling industry. It is a declaration of war.
Now it’s all well and good for the technophiles to say that no one is forcing writers and publishers to accept AI writing. The problem is that Altman and his lot are creating a world where writers will have no choice but to use AI if they want to stay competitive. They are also making it harder to tell the difference between what is AI and what is human. It’s hard to have a choice if you don’t even know what you’re choosing. This is what the so-called “democratization” of AI looks like in practice. It is the opposite of democracy. It is technofascism.
Given these issues, Altman’s actions right before his ouster were tone-deaf at best. He proudly announced at OpenAI’s first Dev Day that GPT-4 Turbo would have longer context length than GPT-4. This length amounted to up to 300 pages of a standard book. This is 16 times more than the previous model. Altman also gloated that paid subscribers of ChatGPT would have their legal fees from copyright lawsuits paid for through his “Copyright Shield” program.
The announcement of “Copyright Shield” comes as OpenAI faces many lawsuits for copyright infringement from many well-known writers. This year, authors Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey sued OpenAI for copyright infringement. They claimed that OpenAI did not ask permission before training ChatGPT on their works, that no writers have no been compensated for the use, and that the works themselves were culled from piracy websites. A similar lawsuit was brought forward this year by the AG, which represented authors such as George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, and George Saunders. The AG has warned that, “Generative AI threatens to decimate the author profession.” Another group of writers, including Michael Chabon, David Henry Hwang, and Rachel Louise Snyder, also announced a lawsuit for similar reasons.
For its part, OpenAI has claimed that they are listening to authors’ concerns. A spokesperson (not Altman), said that “We respect the rights of authors and writers” and that, “We’re having productive conversations with many creators around the world, including the Authors Guild, and have been working cooperatively to understand and discuss their concerns about AI.” I do not believe OpenAI’s sincerity here.
If OpenAI was sincere, would Altman have dismissed the lawsuits against the company as “frivolous”? If OpenAI was sincere, then why are they proceeding to make more powerful chatbots? If OpenAI was sincere, then why didn’t Altman sign the open letter calling for a pause on chatbots more powerful than GPT-4? If OpenAI was sincere, then why did Altman boast about paying the legal fees of ChatGPT users who were sued for copyright violations? I believe actions, not words.
The Chatbot Cult
It’s also worth asking what Altman and many in Silicon Valley mean when they claim to support “AI regulation.” OpenAI, which was founded jointly by Altman and Elon Musk, has always aimed to create a superintelligent AI, that can counter a evil superintelligent AI that is used by bad actors or which wishes to take over humanity. Altman reiterated this goal as late as November, stating that ChatGPT and other OpenAI products are simply tools to that end, “Those are channels into our one single product, which is intelligence, magic intelligence in the sky. I think that’s what we’re about.”
The ultimate goal of OpenAI is to create a new god for the secular age. This search is tied into modern day prophecies of technological singularity. This refers to a point where computers become so advanced that AI intelligence transcends human intelligence, and the boundary between man and machine becomes superfluous. Billionaire Peter Thiel, a major financial backer of OpenAI, has said that his greatest fear is that the singularity won’t come quickly enough. There are many visions of the singularity, but the most popular one is promoted by futurist Ray Kurzweil, who predicts that by 2045, humans will merge with these superintelligent machines and become new creatures altogether.
Kurzweil’s predictions fall perfectly in line with the ideology of transhumanism, and it’s something of an open secret that many in Silicon Valley subscribe to it. Transhumanism is the belief that humans should use technology to modify and enhance our abilities beyond biological constraint. At its simplest level, glasses represent a kind of transhumanism, as they allow most people to see better than their eyes would otherwise permit. At its most extreme end, transhumanism is to discard the flesh and achieve eternal life. This will either be done by adopting cybernetic bodies, reversing the aging process, or implanting our consciousness onto a computer.
So what happens to those who disagree with this vision of the future, or at least its most radical aspects? What happens to those who don’t want to yield every single human activity to new technology? Put simply, they won’t have a place in modern society. Those who stand in the way of “progress” will be made powerless and ineffectual. This is why there is an insistence on integrating AI programs into every facet of modern technology. We are slowly being seduced into ever greater dependence on these programs, to the point where we can’t imagine living without them. Our very thoughts will be at the mercy of corporations who want us addicted, not fulfilled. As we are seeing with writers and other creatives today, the thoughts and feelings of those who disagree are ignored. Adapt or die, as they say. This is but a natural consequence of this coercive version of the transhumanist vision, as philosopher Emile Torres has warned, “Any time you have a utopian vision of the future marked by near infinite amounts of value, and you combine that with a sort of utilitarian mode of moral thinking where the ends can justify the means, it’s going to be dangerous.”
Again, Altman has made it clear that he views this “merge” as inevitable, as he once wrote in a 2017 blog, “…superhuman AI is going to happen, genetic enhancement is going to happen, and brain-machine interfaces are going to happen.” Altman also had a strange habit to referring to biological persons as “median humans”, whom he probably intended to replace, noting that his goal is to have AI “do anything that you’d be happy with a remote coworker doing just behind a computer.”
When you are using ChatGPT, you are not simply playing with a new app to cheat on your English essay. You are being subconsciously indoctrinated into a quasi-religious ideology that seeks a post-human future. Whether or not you believe the singularity will happen is irrelevant. The fact is that Altman and his friends believe in it and they will do whatever they can to empower AI over the human spirit. It was never in his interest to yield to the complaints of “median humans” worried about their jobs. As he once observed:
“The world is going to move faster and faster from here on. People and institutions who embrace this will be richly rewarded. People and institutions who do not or cannot are going to be challenged. Adaptability and speed have gone from valuable to critical.”
Even if we assume that the creation of a superintelligent AI is plausible, let alone desirable, was Altman ever the right man for the job here? It’s no secret that OpenAI has Kenyan workers filter out the sexist, racist, and violent content from ChatGPT’s training datasets. They are only paid $2 an hour and many workers have suffered lasting psychological trauma. Altman has also faced (suspiciously underreported) allegations of sexual abuse from his younger sister, Annie. If these allegations are true, then it appears that Altman’s disrespect for writers may reflect a wider disrespect for people in general.
Against Technopoly
The late educator Neil Postman accurately described the current state of modern society as a technopoly, which he defined as thus:
“Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology. This requires the development of a new kind of social order, and of necessity leads to the rapid dissolution of much that is associated with traditional beliefs” (77).
The technophiles believe that we must surrender all facets of human culture and creativity to AI. There is implicit in this belief the assumption that new technology is always an improvement, and that every human feature is always in need of a new life hack. There is little consideration of what we may stand to lose, and whether what we stand to gain is worth the loss. Or again, the voices of those most affected.
It is clear to me that if writing is to survive, then the creative capacities of chatbots like ChatGPT must be severely restricted. While the author lawsuits are a step in the right direction, they are still insufficient. There’s plenty of public domain and open source material for the chatbots to train on. What’s to prevent publishers from training their AI on the writings of writers whose copyrights they own? We’ve already seen that publishers are willing to rewrite older books to suit modern sensitivities. In R.L. Stine’s case, we saw that they will even do so even without the author’s approval. What’s also to stop successful writers from using AI to publish a new book a month which has been trained on their style? Don’t lie to yourself. Some will be tempted to try it. Is this fair competition?
The technophiles will smear critics of AI as Neo-Luddites. That if you hate some new technology then you must hate all new technology. They will tell us to passively swallow whatever Silicon Valley decides to shove down our throats. They will steamroll the publishing industry and call it progress. They will tell us to delight in the corruption of literature and the hijacking of the imagination. They will tell us to celebrate the replacement of creativity with the mimicry of a stochastic parrot. They will tell us to exchange thinking with convenience. They will tell us to embrace a world where all the books are written by chatbots, where all that anyone ever reads has been authored by a chatbot, where every thought ever been put to writing has been “improved” by a chatbot, and where our culture reflects whatever has been spat out by a chatbot. Is that a world you want to live in?
I don’t. Human literature is worth fighting for. The human writer is worth fighting for. Human creativity is worth fighting for. For if have not even that, then what else do we have?
Please sign author Shawn C. Butler’s petition to get Congress to protect human writers and artists:
Bibliography
Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Vintage Books: New York, 1992. 77.
