"Copyright law might need to be changed" says a big data writer

AI writers take our work without permission and I'm not okay with that. And guess who owns the technology behind it?

Create amazing blog posts 10X faster with AI.

That’s what it says on the homepage of Jasper.ai.

“Blog posts” is animated and changes to other words. Like…

Create amazing blog posts, marketing copy, sales emails, SEO content, web content.

Recently I read a post by a guy who is building an entire content-rich site all populated with writing by Jasper. He shared some of his rankings and results. He said he’s really excited because he doesn’t need to write all the posts anymore.

So I went to look.

I had to stop a minute and digest. Process what I was seeing.

Do you remember content spinners?

They were all the rage over a decade ago, maybe more. Basically software programs you could buy. You could copy/paste someone else’s writing into them and the software would swap words with synonyms to pass a plagiarism detector.

Except, it didn’t always sound quite right. Here’s an example.

So, let's take this sentence.

A spinner would rewrite that with synonyms. It would turn out like this:

Therefore, let's acquire this sentence.

lol.

Pretty much everyone except spinners saw spinning as a form of plagiarism. Mostly because there had to be an actual person behind it, copy/pasting articles into the software. So they knew what they were doing, you know?

Google hated spinners. But until about 2012, they sucked at detecting spun content. Sometime after 2012, Google became really good at detecting spinner content. When they found it on a site, they often dumped the entire site out of google.

Spinners became kind of passé. Old technology.

I’m sure some people are still using them, but not like a decade ago.

But today? Enter AI.

A lot of big companies are using AI

According to the Jasper site, their clients include HarperCollins, IBM, Logitech, Zillow and thousands of others. Know who else is in their client list? The company that learned to dump spun content. Google. Google uses AI for content.

Here’s some of the reviews from Jasper’s media list:

• Adweek: “Powerful AI Set a New Bar For Writing Copy”

• Forbes: “Must Have SEO tool for Marketing Directors”

• Wired: “Creates Marketing Copy That Wins Clicks”

So I checked out their demo. I set the video clip (below) to start right at the demo so you don’t have to listen to the pitching. Have a look at this:

You just tell it what to write about and away it goes.

Hey Jasper, write about meditation. And it does. SEO optimized, yet. Apparently, you can tell it what tone of voice to use. You want bold? You want sympathetic. Just say so, and Jasper will deliver. Apparently, Jasper can even be “punny.”

But how does it do that? Where do all the words come from? That’s what I wanted to know.

If you start digging around to figure out HOW Jasper and other AI programs are writing content fluently you hear a lot of lingo from tech bros.

They explain it about as clearly as they explain crypto.

They throw out terms like Natural Language Generation (NLG), big data analysis, and machine learning. They’ll say it uses open source technology called GPT-3 and that GPT-3 means Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, which is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.

What? Can you say that in English? Explain like I’m 5?

So I dug deeper and then I got kind of mad.

Do you remember the 80s movie Short Circuit?

It starred Ally Sheedy and a little robot called “Number 5” who was hit by lightning and became alive. And once Number 5 was alive, he wanted nothing more than to learn. Input, he’d shriek, more input!!!! Here… enjoy. Is short and fun.

Guess where AI writers get their input?

Jasper is just one of many AI writing programs. And the tech bros are right. They all use the same open source technology, called GPT-3.

Dumb analogy, but it’s like if I cloned a dog six times and gave each to a different home. Same dog, but it would be trained differently. Make sense?

Same concept. GPT-3 is the “brains” of the “artificial intelligence” writer. Each company offering AI uses the same “brain,” but they all have their own way of “programming” it for humans to interact with.

Like, there’s one that’s programmed specifically to write sales letters. I’m sure as more companies pop up, they’ll each find their own little niche to drill into.

Know where AI gets all the “stuff” it writes about?

From us. You, me and every other writer on the internet.

GPT-3 is the largest and most sophisticated neural network to date. And it’s been “trained” on internet data. Basically, content. From the internet.

Jasper’s site explains it much more clearly. Jasper has read 10% of the internet so far, the site explains. That’s why it can emulate human writing pretty decently.

As of now, there is 97 zettabytes of content on the internet.

It’s an unfathomable number. One zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes. A trillion is one million times one million. No one can wrap their head around numbers that big. The biggest hard drive you can buy is a drop of water and the internet is the ocean.

There’s more content than you can wrap your head around. And Jasper and every other AI are gobbling it up like #5 is alive. So they can keep learning to write like a human. Improving every day, every week, every month.

Unlike the old content spinners, no one is taking “my” article and plugging it into a software program. Instead, all the content we create is gobbled up by the giant artificial brain and used to spit out fresh content from what we taught it.

But, what about copyright?

I read an in depth article about the features and shortcomings of AI technology on a site called Big Data. For example, it doesn’t write well in the Climate change space yet. It will. But it’s not there yet. It hasn’t chomped enough content yet, apparently.

The writer said some people are concerned about copyright. In general, copyright exists as soon as unique content is written and published. But, the writer says, copyright may need to change as the technology evolves.

“copyright law may need to adapt to new creation concepts as technology evolves.”
(source; insidebigdata.com)

Here’s the kicker. Know who owns GPT-3?

It’s true that GPT-3 is open source software that anyone can license to create their own AI writing program. Give it a cute icon and a fun name and you’re in business.

But open source doesn’t mean there isn’t an owner. It just means anyone can tap into it. GPT-3 has an owner. Know who owns it?

Bill Gates.

Here’s what I want to know.

Why do rich people keep working so hard to end jobs that keep the rest of us working and putting food on the table? Because all those “thousands of” companies using Jasper and other AI programs to create their content and web copy and social posts and headlines — they don’t need to hire people like me or you anymore.

Jasper is $82/month for up to 100,000 words of generated content. Who the heck needs to pay a writer at that price? Think about it. That’s 100 articles of 1000 words each. 100 5-minutes reads for 82 bucks. Who needs to pay a writer?

Plus? Robots don’t ask for vacation or benefits. They don’t need computers or bathroom breaks or a day off. Companies don’t need writers because AI has gobbled our words and learned to write like a human passably enough that we’re optional.

I don’t know what I think about that yet.

How about you? Have you used an AI writer? Are you the tiniest bit curious?

What do you think of the whole mess?

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xo,
Linda