Tony Gilroy, creator/showrunner of (among many other projects) of the Disney+ Star Wars series Andor, said in 2023 that he planned to release the show’s scripts for fans to read. Last week, he explained why he hasn’t: He doesn’t want those scripts read by artificial intelligence. “Why help the f***ing robots any more than you can?,” he told Collider.
Meanwhile, more than 400 industry entertainment figures recently appealed, in an open letter to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, against letting AI models read from, and train on, Hollywood’s output:
“America’s arts and entertainment industry supports over 2.3M American jobs with over $229Bn in wages annually …. AI companies are asking to undermine this economic and cultural strength by weakening copyright protections for the films, television series, artworks, writing, music, and voices used to train AI models at the core of multi-billion dollar corporate valuations.”
There’s nothing new about demands that government deny tuition and reading material to whomever or whatever might threaten the interests of a powerful economic class.
“Allow our slaves to read your writings,” pro-slavery advocate James M. Hammond wrote to British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson in 1845, “stimulating them to cut our throats! Can you believe us to be such unspeakable fools?”
In most southern states prior to the Civil War and the end of chattel slavery, teaching a slave (or, in some cases, anyone with dark skin) to read and write was punishable by fine or imprisonment if the teacher was white, flogging if the teacher was black.
As relatives of antebellum slaveholders go, the jealous beneficiaries of “intellectual property” laws aren’t especially distant. The former claimed to own their subjects’ bodies first, and secondarily, as the anti-literacy laws demonstrated, minds. The latter merely reverse those priorities.
Nor are their reasons dissimilar.
Slaveholders believed that, absent a property rights claim on other bodies, their plantation-based economic model would collapse.
Copyright holders believe that absent a property rights claim on other minds, the journalists, novelists, screenwriters, and actors of the world might have to find other jobs.
As a practical matter, the former were only temporarily right (agriculture produces more, both more profitably and at lower prices now than it did then), and I suspect the latter are just wrong.
As a moral concern, such claims of ownership over the bodies, minds, or both of others are repugnant.
In both areas, the “open letter” smacks of the Charlottesville marchers’ “Jews will not replace us” chant.
Those who don’t want “the robots” to read and learn from their creations are, as Gilroy notices, free to simply not publish those creations — but if they DO publish them, they’re not entitled to demand that certain people or entities not notice and learn from them.
