The academic library conference of the year is always the LIBER Conference. “State-of-the-art academic libraries are serving science and society.” See the website for more information as it comes available.
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This is my response to Industry Canada’s Consultation on Copyright in the Age of Artificial General Intelligence. The deadline for responses has been extended to Jan. 15, 2024.
Technical Evidence
Question*:
How do businesses and consumers use AI systems
and AI-assisted and AI-generated content in your area of knowledge, work, or
organization?
My response:
In libraries, machine
learning AI in the form of recommender systems ranking results by relevance (like
Netflix) is in widespread use. Generative AI is in earlier stages of
exploration and/or implementation in libraries and information management as a
means of further automating and enriching information resource description and
classification. On the other hand, the tendency of popular AI tools such as
ChatGPT to invent content is raising concerns about spread of mis- and
disinformation, complicating the work of ensuring that the public has access to
high quality, accurate information. In academia, AI is in early stages of use
for the purposes of accelerating research. AI raises both interest and concern
with respect to pedagogy. Noteworthy examples of emerging types of applications
include language learning supports for students, brainstorming, and automated
translation, noting that results to date are best considered as early drafts.
Text and Data Mining
Questions:
If the Government
were to amend the Act to clarify the scope of permissible TDM activities, what
should be its scope and safeguards? What would be the expected impact of such
an exception on your industry and activities?
Should there be any
obligations on AI developers to keep records of or disclose what copyright-protected
content was used in the training of AI systems?
My response:
TDM for discovery
purposes should be legal across all kinds of materials (e.g. to find songs,
films, novels, and stories of interest, not for AGI training). To facilitate the
advances AI is making possible in scientific and non-commercial research, TDM
for training AGI should be legal for these purposes (follow UK / Switzerland
example). One recommended change in copyright law to facilitate AI advances in
Canada is to eliminate Section 41 Technological Protection Measures and
Rights Management Information from the Copyright Act. This section prohibits
circumvention even for purposes that are legal under the Act while it is
unnecessary for purposes that are illegal under the Act. AI developers should
be required to track and disclose materials used for training purposes. Legislation
to this effect at this time would encourage development of efficient automated
processes at an early stage in AI development.
Authorship and
ownership of works created by AI
Questions:
Is the uncertainty
surrounding authorship or ownership of AI-assisted and AI-generated works and
other subject matter impacting the development and adoption of AI technologies?
If so, how?
Should the Government
propose any clarification or modification of the copyright ownership and
authorship regimes in light of AI-assisted or AI-generated works? If so, how?
My response:
Rapid growth of
AI-generated content demonstrates that concerns about authorship and ownership
are not a significant impediment. A Google search for “Amazon ChatGPT
self-publishing” retrieves over 21 million results, with how-to books and
publishing services at the top of the list. ChatGPT can produce a story “in the
style of” a human author such as Margaret Atwood in seconds. This rapid growth raises
two types of concerns 1) for human creators whose works and identity can easily
be used with AI training to create new works to compete with the original
creator and 2) for increasing production and distribution of mis/disinformation
when a tool like ChatGPT (described by AI experts as having a tendency to “hallucinate”)
is used to create nonfiction works without the oversight of human experts.
Comments and suggestions
My response:
Achieving the potential
benefits of AI requires TDM exemptions for scientific and non-commercial research
following the UK / Switzerland example and elimination of Section 41 of the Copyright
Act Technological Protection Measures and Rights Management Information. Most
potential benefits of AI do not involve the use of others’ copyrighted material
– for example, companies and individuals using AI to automate or build on their
own work. Encouraging AI users to make use of the copyrighted work of human
creators raises two concerns, 1) the possibility of training AI using the work
and identity of a human creator to capitalize on their identity and compete
with them in the marketplace, and 2) the possibility of increasing creation of
mis/dis-information in the case of non-fiction works. Concern about AI identity
misuse is broader than traditional copyrighted works, for example use of images
of individuals in pornographic works without their knowledge or consent.
* The consultation includes more questions – I am only including the questions here that I chose to respond to.
We asked the Chefs for their thoughts on the Biden Administration’s Executive Order on “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.”
The post Ask The Chefs: The US Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
A selection of questions and answers from Copyright Clearance Center’s response to the United States Copyright Office “Artificial Intelligence and Copyright” request for comment.
The post The United States Copyright Office Notice of Inquiring on AI: A Quick Take appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Separately, both open research and AI are considered disrupters, causes of disorder in the normal continuance of scholarly publishing. But approaching them in a synchronized way can offer more productivity gains and efficiencies than taking them on individually.
The post Approaching Artificial Intelligence and Open Research in Sync: Opportunities and Challenges appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Generative AI wants to make information cheap, but will people want to read it? Are we ready for more productive writers?
The post AI Will Lead Us to Need More Garbage-subtraction. appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
This comment was submitted Oct. 26, 2023 to the U.S. Copyright Office’s Artificial Intelligence Study
Copyright laws internationally do not provide human creators with sufficient moral and related rights (identity and publicity) in the context of artificial intelligence. Significant work is needed at the national and international levels to meet what I would argue is a minimal ethical standard, and this should not be rushed. In the meantime, the remedy that I recommend is to limit copyright on works produced with substantial AI involvement to AI works trained on material in the public domain. For example, AI artists are creating new works based on freely available images from the Mars rover; such works do not raise the ethical questions that are the focus of this submission. To illustrate the problem when works are based on contemporary human creators, note that current AI tools such as Stable Diffusion (images) and ChatGPT allow anyone to create new works “in the style of” a particular creator, and it is clear that this is occuring without any attempt to obtain permission from the creator. With ChatGPT, anyone can quickly verify this by asking ChatGPT to write a story “in the style of” any well-known author. The works of Canadian artists that were not publicly available have been found in a service using Stable Diffusion, along with a tool to create new works “in the style of” these artists. If this is done with the intent of publishing the results, I argue that this is an example of identity theft or fraud, particularly (but not exclusively) if the downstream creation is published with the name of the original creator with commercial benefit to the downstream creator. There are potential reputational and economic harms to original creators. I argue that the potential harms to living human creators far outweigh any benefit from permitting AI to use their works and identity until legal protections can be put into place. As context for this comment, I would like to note that I am excited about the potential of AI to achieve more rapid advances in science, medicine, and everyday productivity in our workplaces and homes. I am an Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Information Studies, submitting as an individual, and long-time advocate for open access to scholarly publications, a topic on which I have contributed to prior U.S. government publications. Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this consultation.
Since its inception, the focus of The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics (IJPE) has been on open access while my original intention was always the broader topic of poetic economics (radical rethinking of how we can make use of the resources available to us to create a better world). As you may have noticed, my most recent IJPE post on OA is dated 2020. For a more complete set of my research on OA over the past decade, see Sustaining the Knowledge Commons (completed in 2022). As of October 2023, the focus of IJPE, reflecting my current research, is shifting towards information policy and in particular policy-related aspects of artificial intelligence (AI).
A report of the Chef’s panel on AI, Open content, and research integrity during the Frankfurt Book Fair.
The post Chefs Panel Discusses AI, Integrity and Open Content in Frankfurt appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
In 2023, AI has been back in the news in a big way. Large Language Models and ChatGPT threatened our’s and many other industries with huge disruption. As with so many threatened techno-shocks, a large degree of this one was hype, but what will happen after the hype fades. What, if anything, will be the lasting legacy of ChatGPT?
The post GPT, Large Language Models, and the Trough of Disillusionment appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Human-dependent peer review is inequitable, suffers from injustice, and is potentially unsustainable. Here’s why we should replace it (eventually) with AI-based peer review.
The post Ending Human-Dependent Peer Review appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
How do we strike a balance between humans and AI to improve peer review? We’ve interviewed a few publishing experts who specialize in human and AI ethical, equitable, and sustainable publishing solutions to share their thoughts on the future of peer review.
The post Guest Post — Striking a Balance: Humans and Machines in the Future of Peer Review and Publishing appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
In today’s post Alice Meadows, Jasmine Wallace, and Karin Wulf kick off a week of posts to celebrate Peer Review Week 2023 with their thoughts on peer review and the future of publishing.
The post Reflections on Peer Review and the Humane Future of Publishing appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
The challenges offered by artificial intelligence require a different approach than that seen for plagiarism detection.
The post Publishers, Don’t Use AI Detection Tools! appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Was a recent Scholarly Kitchen piece analyzing the capabilities of ChatGPT a fair test? What happens if you run a similar test with an improved prompt on LLMs that are internet connected and up to date?
The post Guest Post – Was ChatGPT Set Up to Fail? Choosing the Right Tools and the Right Prompts is Essential for LLM Discovery appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.