I’ve just sat in on a fascinating talk hosted by the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) looking at how writers might get along in future with ChatGPT and all its cousins. Not sure there were any answers, but it made me think.

These are a rough outline of the main points that I took away from the talk:

1. Many of the artificial intelligence tools are being created in America.
2. The capability of these tools (whether intelligent or not) is improving rapidly.
3. They mine open source data voraciously, without being particularly mindful of copyright.
4. Their appeal to ‘bottom line’ enthusiasts is enormous.
5. They require considerable resources to run, both human and environmental, which jeopardises both their ‘ethical’ and their ‘sustainability’ credentials.

How should the creative industries respond? We all pondered this, not quite sure about the answer, but cheered by news that apparently an American court had ruled that content created solely by artificial intelligence could not be copyrighted. This should link to a piece in The Guardian giving more context to this ruling.

So how then to value the work created by humans? Perhaps one way forward might be for individual writers to apply for something equivalent to a trademark to provide assurance that work carrying the mark has been created by an idientifiable individual, and that no ChatGPT or its like have been used. Use of such tools would disqualify use of trademarks. In other words we would be certifying ourselves and our work as ‘organically human’ (and, ideally, sustainable, ethical, and perhaps listed as originating from a particular region).

I may be a bit late with this idea but I thought I’d put it out there.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023