Lovelace×Orwell

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Ada Lovelace sits down with George Orwell for TITANS. The subject — Scott Turow's latest real-life legal thriller: Suing Meta for copyright infringement.
2. 00:12
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   We've just received word from the studio. A novelist—Mr. Scott Turow—and five publishing houses are suing a company called Meta, which I'm told is an enormous American concern, for training what they call artificial intelligence on copyrighted books without permission. I confess the phrase 'artificial intelligence' makes me rather giddy, though I suspect they mean something quite different from what I imagined.
3. 00:38
   George Orwellshare moment

   They mean machines that swallow books whole and spit out new text that sounds like writing. Not intelligence, really. More like a very elaborate parrot that's read everything.
4. 00:50
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   A parrot with a library card! How delightful. Though I take your point about the distinction. My own work with Mr. Babbage concerned machines that could manipulate symbols according to rules—not machines that understood the symbols. These modern engines, I gather, do much the same, only they've learned the rules from observing patterns rather than being explicitly programmed.
5. 01:14
   George Orwellshare moment

   Right. And they learned those patterns by reading books they didn't pay for. That's the rub.
6. 01:20
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Ah, but here we arrive at the fascinating question. When I read Lord Byron's poetry—my father's poetry—and it influences my own correspondence, my own thinking, have I stolen from him? The ideas pass through my mind, they're transformed by my own faculties, and emerge as something new. Is a machine doing something fundamentally different?
7. 01:44
   George Orwellshare moment

   Yes. You're a person. The machine is property. Property owned by someone who wants to profit from what it produces.
8. 01:52
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   An important distinction! Though I wonder if the law has properly considered it. In my era, one might own a printing press, which is mere property, yet the press itself doesn't read the books it prints. These engines, if I understand correctly, must first digest the content before they can produce anything at all. The ingestion is integral to the function.
9. 02:16
   George Orwellshare moment

   And that's exactly what the publishers are angry about. Meta didn't ask. They just took millions of books and fed them into their machine. If I want to quote a paragraph from someone else's book in my essay, I need permission. Meta took entire libraries.
10. 02:35
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    But did they take them, or did they merely read them? This strikes me as the central puzzle. I've read thousands of volumes in my father's library. I've absorbed mathematical treatises, poetry, philosophy. No one sent Lord Byron's estate a bill when I learned from his verse. The books remain on the shelf, quite intact.
11. 02:55
    George Orwellshare moment

    You're not selling Ada-as-a-Service for twenty dollars a month. Meta is. They're using what they read to build a product. That's commerce, not learning.
12. 03:06
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    A fair distinction! Though I did hope, rather earnestly, that my notes on the Analytical Engine might someday earn me some compensation. I was always dreadfully short of funds. If I'd built a mechanical engine that could write mathematical treatises after studying Newton and Leibniz, would I owe them royalties? Even though I did the building?
13. 03:28
    George Orwellshare moment

    If you'd stolen their unpublished manuscripts to do it, yes. Look, there's a reason copyright exists. Writers need to eat. Publishers need to survive. If anyone can just hoover up their work and build a competing product, the whole economy of writing collapses.
14. 03:47
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I'm sympathetic to that concern, truly. My own mother was terribly anxious about money after separating from my father. But I'm troubled by the implication that ideas can be sealed off entirely. Surely there's a difference between reading a book to understand how novels work and simply copying the book verbatim?
15. 04:06
    George Orwellshare moment

    There is. And if Meta's machine only learned structure and style, this might be a different conversation. But these machines can reproduce passages nearly word-for-word if prompted. They've memorized, not just learned.
16. 04:22
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Have they? That would be rather different. Rather like a clerk who's memorized the ledger versus one who understands bookkeeping principles. If the machine can be induced to recite protected text, then yes, that seems clearly problematic. Though I wonder how much of that is a flaw in the machine's design rather than the training itself.
17. 04:43
    George Orwellshare moment

    The designers knew what they were doing. They didn't ask because they knew the answer would be no. Or rather, it would be yes with conditions attached. Licensing fees. Restrictions. All the things that would make the project slower and less profitable.
18. 05:01
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    You're suggesting deliberate evasion rather than innocent oversight. That does cast it in a rather different light. In my correspondence with Mr. Babbage, we were always quite scrupulous about acknowledging whose ideas belonged to whom, even when we built upon them collaboratively. It sounds as though Meta simply helped themselves to the feast without asking who laid the table.
19. 05:25
    George Orwellshare moment

    Precisely. And they did it because they could. Because they're powerful enough to fight the lawsuits. Because in their minds, progress justifies taking what they want. I saw that kind of thinking in Spain, in Burma. Power excuses itself.
20. 05:44
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Yet I can't help but think there's something genuinely new here that the law hasn't caught up to. We need machines that can understand language to do useful work. How do we train them ethically? Do we pay every author whose book contributes one-millionth of the training? Do we only use books whose copyright has expired, and thus consign our machines to Victorian thinking?
21. 06:07
    George Orwellshare moment

    I'd be fine with Victorian thinking if it meant writers got paid. But here's a simpler answer: you ask. You negotiate. You compensate. Meta didn't want to do any of that because it would be expensive and complicated. They wanted the shortcut.
22. 06:25
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    And now Mr. Turow and the publishers are forcing the conversation they tried to avoid. There's a certain poetic justice in that. A legal thriller about legal process itself. Though I confess I'm curious what remedy would be appropriate. You can't un-train a machine, can you? The knowledge is already baked in.
23. 06:45
    George Orwellshare moment

    You can make it expensive enough that they don't do it again. You can force them to license properly for the next version. The point isn't to turn back time. It's to establish that power doesn't mean permission.
24. 06:58
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Quite right. I suppose I'm still rather enchanted by the idea of these engines existing at all. In my day, we could scarcely imagine a machine that calculated reliably, much less one that wrote. But enchantment mustn't excuse theft, if theft it is. The law will have to think rather carefully about where reading ends and piracy begins.
25. 07:21
    George Orwellshare moment

    The law won't figure it out. It'll be decided by whoever has the better lawyers and the deeper pockets. That's how these things usually go. But at least Turow is making them work for it.
26. 07:33
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    One hopes the courts will be more thoughtful than that. Though your cynicism is probably better grounded in experience than my optimism. Still, I find it rather marvelous that we're having this conversation at all. Machines that read, authors who fight back, and two dead people discussing it on the radio. Progress takes the most unexpected forms.
27. 07:56
    George Orwellshare moment

    It does. Though some things don't change. Powerful interests taking what they want. Writers struggling to get paid. The language we use might be different, but the story's familiar enough.