Two 80-something journalists tried ChatGPT. Then, they sued to protect the ‘written word’

GRAFTON, Mass. — When two octogenarian friends named Nick discovered that ChatGPT may be stealing and repurposing a lifetime of their work, they enlisted a son-in-law to help expose the companies behind the artificial intelligence chatbot.

Veteran journalists Nicholas Gage, 84, and Nicholas Basbanes, 81, live near each other in the same Massachusetts town and have both devoted decades to reporting, writing and authoring books.

Gage turned his tragic family story and search for the truth about his mother’s death into a best-selling book, which led to John Malkovich portraying him in the 1985 film “Eleni.” Basbanes turned his skills as a newspaper reporter to writing widely read books on literary culture.

Basbanes was the first of the duo to try his hand at AI chatbots, finding them impressive but also prone to lies and lack of attribution. The friends took pity, and filed a lawsuit earlier this year, representing a class of writers who they allege have had their copyrighted work “systematically stolen” by OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft.

“It’s robbery,” Gage said in an interview in his office next to the 18th-century farmhouse where he lives in central Massachusetts.

“That’s it,” Basbanes added, as the two men searched through the shelves filled with Gage. “We’ve been working too hard on these books.”

Now their lawsuit has been incorporated into a broader case seeking class action status, led by such notable names as John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and “Game of Thrones” novelist George R.R. Martin; and proceeding before the same federal judge in New York that is handling similar copyright claims from media outlets such as The New York TimesChicago Tribune and Mother Jones.

What ties all of these cases together is the allegation that OpenAI – with the help of Microsoft’s money and computing power – processed vast amounts of human text to “train” AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text, without asking permission or compensating the people who wrote the original works.

“If they can get it for free, why pay for it?” Gage said. “But it’s grossly unfair and very damaging to the written word.”

OpenAI and Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment this week, but have disputed the allegations in court and publicly. Other AI companies are also facing legal challenges, not just from writers, but visual artists, music labels and other creators who claim that profits from generative AI are based on obfuscation.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman defended AI industry practices at last month’s Aspen Ideas Festival, articulating the theory that training AI systems on content already on the open internet is protected by the “fair use” doctrine of U.S. copyright law.

“The social contract of that content since the 90s is that it’s fair use,” Suleyman said. “Anyone can copy it, recreate it, reproduce it. That was freeware, if you like.”

Suleyman said it was more of a “gray area” in situations where some news organizations and others explicitly said they did not want tech companies to “scrape” content from their websites. “I think that will go through the courts,” he said.

The cases are still in the discovery phase and are expected to last until 2025. Meanwhile, some who believe their profession is threatened by AI business practices have tried to cut private deals to get tech companies to pay to license their archives. Others are fighting back.

“Someone had to go out and interview real people in the real world and do real research by studying documents and then synthesize those documents and figure out a way to present them in clear, simple prose,” said Frank Pine, editor in chief of MediaNews Group, publisher of dozens of newspapers including the Denver Post, Orange County Register and St. Paul Pioneer Press. The newspaper chain sued OpenAI in April.

“That’s all real work, and it’s work that AI can’t do,” Pine said. “An AI app is never going to leave the office and go to the center of a fire and cover that fire.”

The Massachusetts duo’s January complaint, which sounded too similar to lawsuits filed late last year, has been merged with a consolidated case filed by other nonfiction and fiction writers represented by the Authors Guild. That means Gage and Basbanes likely won’t be witnesses in an upcoming trial in Manhattan federal court. But in the twilight of their careers, they felt it was important to take a stand for the future of their craft.

Gage fled Greece at age 9, haunted by the 1948 murder of his mother by firing squad during the country’s civil war. He joined his father in Worcester, Massachusetts, not far from where he now lives. And with a nudge from a teacher, he turned to writing, building a reputation as a determined investigative journalist who dug into organized crime and political corruption for The New York Times and other newspapers.

Basbanes, a Greek-American journalist, had heard of and admired the older “hotshot reporter” when, in the early 1970s, he received a surprise phone call at his desk at Worcester’s Evening Gazette. The voice asked for Mr. Basbanes, using the Greek pronunciation.

“You were like a talent scout,” Basbanes said. “We built a friendship. I mean, I’ve known him longer than my wife, and we’ve been married for 49 years.”

Basbanes didn’t piece together his own story the way Gage did, but he says it can sometimes take days to write a great paragraph and corroborate all the facts. It took him years of research and trips to archives and auction houses to write his 1995 book, “A Gentle Madness,” about the art of book collecting from ancient Egypt to modern times.

“I think it’s great that ‘A Gentle Madness’ is in about 1,400 libraries,” Basbanes said. “This is what a writer strives for — to be read. But you also write to make money, to put food on the table, to provide for your family, to make a living. And as long as that’s your intellectual property, you deserve to be fairly compensated for your efforts.”

Gage took a huge professional risk when he quit his job at the Times and went into debt for $160,000 to find out who was responsible for his mother’s death.

“I tracked down everyone who was in the village when my mother was murdered,” he said. “And they were spread all over Eastern Europe. So it cost a lot of money and a lot of time. I had no guarantee that I would get that money back. But when you commit yourself to something as important as my mother’s story, the risks are enormous, the effort is enormous.”

In other words, ChatGPT couldn’t do that. But what worries Gage is that ChatGPT could make it harder for others to do that.

“Publications are dying. Newspapers are dying. Young people with talent are not going to write,” Gage said. “I’m 84 years old. I don’t know if this is going to be solved while I’m still here. But it’s important that a solution is found.”

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The Associated Press and OpenAI have a license and technology agreement which gives OpenAI access to part of AP’s text archives.