In the battle of authors vs robots, the entire craft of writing is at stake – but do readers care about originality?

Two novelists have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming its technology unlawfully ingested their work. It could be a watershed moment in the debate on AI’s threat to creativity, writes Claire Allfree

The idea of books as content to be consumed rather than savoured has existed for much longer than the internet (Getty)

There are four chords that get used in pop songs, and there are however many notes – eight notes or whatever – and there are 60,000 songs released every single day.” This was Ed Sheeran speaking in May this year, days after winning a copyright infringement case that had accused him of ripping off Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” in his hit “Thinking Out Loud”. That judgment was largely seen as a triumph for a creative industry that historically has always thrived on a degree of recycling, and where riffing on other people’s riffs is, as Elvis Costello airily put it, “how rock and roll works”. But what happens when it’s the robots doing the riffing, and when it’s not three or four chords that are in contention but entire written paragraphs – pages and pages of words, even? We might soon be about to find out.

This week, the best-selling authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay filed a lawsuit in San Francisco against OpenAI. They claim its ChatGPT language model infringed their copyright because it was apparently trained using data from their books without their consent. As copyright spats go, it lacks the spectacle of that between Universal Studios and 20th Century Fox in 1977, in which the latter argued the former had modelled its film Battlestar Galactica a little too closely on the Fox megahit Star Wars. Yet the case, the first time ChatGPT has faced a copyright suit, has the potential to become a watershed moment in the rapidly accelerating battle between man and robots, not to mention blowing open the hitherto highly secretive world of AI training.

On the one side are the authors, whose livelihood relies on blood, sweat and their unique creative abilities. On the other, the faceless tech giants, who have trained a piece of software to effortlessly mine reams of written text in order to reduce the human imagination into a theoretically all-conquering algorithm. In the middle are the lawyers, faced with the Gordian task of how to regulate the wild west of an increasingly AI-led internet.