Susan Glickman is a novelist and poet living in Toronto.
Back in 1959, when I was finally permitted to walk the five blocks to school without adult supervision, my friend Karen introduced me to a new game called “snitching.” Its rules were simple: Grab some penny candy from the display at Mr. Lou’s corner store when he was busy with a customer, then leave without paying for it.
Like most children my age, I had a sweet tooth; unlike most, I was infallibly naive. So naive that I told my mother about this entertaining activity, only to be mortified when she reframed it as “stealing” and marched me back to the store to apologize to Mr. Lou.
Twenty-three years later I encountered the same moral obtuseness in those of my students at the University of Toronto who plagiarized despite having been told that claiming other people’s work as one’s own was theft. And not only the students: In one instance, a furious mother berated me on the telephone for having destroyed her daughter’s dream of becoming a schoolteacher.
It wasn’t my decision to fail the girl. The dean had insisted on it because she had already been caught cheating three times and each time had been let off with a warning. That her offspring’s persistent dishonesty made her ill-suited to be in charge of children did not seem to have occurred to the indignant mother.
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I learned my lesson when I was six years old, but some folks never do. Indeed, more and more people today are oblivious to the fact that stealing intellectual property is as much a crime as stealing material property. Even when they understand that the practice is dishonest, they don’t care about its victims. Easy access to online content has persuaded them that any product of human creativity ought to be available free of charge. They rationalize pirating music or videos because the big entertainment companies make so much money. They don’t consider that they are robbing those who created the art they are filching, who are for the most part underpaid and sometimes – especially in the case of musicians, writers, and painters – actually poor.
I am one of those underpaid writers. And like most, I search my name online from time to time to see if there are any new reviews of my work. (When you don’t make much money, respect is the reward you crave.) Recently, I was idly scrolling when I came upon something extraordinary. In Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Students, Thompson Rivers University, situated in Kamloops, British Columbia, suggests the following:
“You may use AI-generated output if your professor permitted you to use it to discuss it critically. For example, if you are permitted to prompt ChatGPT to write a poem in the style of Susan Glickman or prompt DALL-E to create an image in the style of Dorothy Knowles, and include the output in your work to discuss it’s [sic] style, etc.”
Apart from the bad grammar, and the obvious fact that if you want to discuss my poetry critically you should read the poetry I myself have written and not whatever AI is able to produce in my style, these instructions are encouraging the theft of intellectual property. Why? Because “to prompt ChatGPT to write a poem in the style of Susan Glickman” requires ChatGPT to scrape the internet for examples of my work and use them without permission or payment: something The Writers Union of Canada – like all writers’ organizations worldwide – has been trying very hard to educate people not to do.
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Belatedly acknowledging that perhaps this isn’t such a great suggestion after all, the paragraph continues:
“You should still include an acknowledgement of how you used the AI tool and a citation for the output (see the Citing AI page). If you are using generated images, audio files, and/or codes, check if your AI tool mentions any use or copyright restrictions on the works it creates.”
But asking students to check whether their “AI tool mentions any use or copyright restrictions on the works it creates” is asking the fox to guard the henhouse. And the librarian who compiled this nonsense acknowledges it tangentially in the parenthetical advice to “see the Citing AI page.” If you follow that link, you will discover that indeed, “you may be infringing copyright” by using generative AI. This is because ”AI tools use content from the internet to generate their output. In Canada, content in a fixed form is automatically copyrighted. For example, if you prompt a text-generating AI tool to create a song similar to Leonard Cohen’s Anthem, or ask an image-generating AI tool to create an image using the style of a contemporary artist, you may be infringing copyright as AI tools draw from the existing works and reproduce derivatives of them."
If I were an undergraduate trying to understand under which circumstances it was permissible to use AI, this university’s “guide” would leave me more bewildered than I was before I read it!
Is it really expecting too much of those who don’t create intellectual property to ask them to respect the creations of those who do? When I told my friends how infuriated I was by this incident, two of them suggested that I ought to have been flattered that people wanted to steal my work! All I can do to persuade them to reconsider their response is to quote Shakespeare’s Othello:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’Tis something, nothing;
’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.