While (in general) I agree with arguments against “copywriting hell”, in particular this case it is not about copywriting itself, but about the consequences of GenAI to entire industry.
Journalists exist not without a reason, yes they work with facts and very often — open facts, but they still assemble those facts in certain way to construct a narrative, connect dots and tell us some story (not counting cases when journalist works with their sources and produce a unique inside information). Then OpenAI comes, says “thank you very much” and assemble all of journalists work into one Uber Knowledgeable Journalist who can answer all of your questions.
So far so good, we create a public good service, and copywriters are in shambles.
Until you start making money on it.
That’s where the problem.
If OpenAI would be a non profit organization like Wiki Foundation, who just wants to make internet as better place — not much arguments you can find to support NYT lawsuit. But monetization changes everything.
Basically NYT is not worried about re using its text as itself, it is worried that no one will want to visit NYT no more and will pay Microsoft/Google and get all answers from them.
Let’s put an example. There were a famous story when FT journalist discover a massive fraud in Wirecard accounting and essentially lead to a death of this organization. That articles were a result of multi-year reporting work when journalist piece by piece and step by step collect facts, meet people, and eventually spot the gap. Now, in age of Bard/Bing/ChatGPT, you don’t need to read original article to know all of this. You can ask search engine or Chatbot and get essential re phrasing of an original reporter work. You don’t need no more to go to FT, pay them for paywall, watch their ads, etc. Effectively FT make a huge investment into their people to allow them spend 2 years on this issue and report it and now have a 0 leads to their website because all of them are eaten by Google and Microsoft who will sell you their ads and retain you in their monetized products.
Imagine that you built a for-profit paid library for some task. You make a code available through paywall and ask people to pay you to get to it and solve their problems. Then Microsoft comes, sneak beyond paywall, scrap your code and publish it recompiled and slightly optimized version in open access, so no one longer ever need to go on your website but ask Microsoft to show them your code.
Would you be happy?
All of this cases for me make this case not such easy and straightforward as it seems to be “bad copywriters against progress of humanity”.
At the end of the day, if NYT/FT/New Yorker and others will stop publishing their work and fire all journalists, will ChatGPT tell us same depth level stories as we read there?