It only took them three and a half years, but the powers that be at OpenAI have apparently directed ChatGPT to start refusing requests to copy a specific author’s style, Ars Technica reports. And it’s causing an absolute meltdown among “writers” who had grown accustomed to using the chatbot to churn out stories.
Word spread quickly on the r/WritingWithAI subreddit, where one person using ChatGPT to write an entire novel made a post fuming that the chatbot is “not letting you emulate specific authors anymore.”
“Now Ms. GPT says she can’t generate content in the style of specific authors,” the user complained, using what appears to be an eyebrow-raising nickname for the chatbot. “My prompts were soooo specific and I got exactly what I wanted out of them. For example, ‘rewrite in the literary style of ‘author here’ with abundant dialogue and detail avoiding staccato prose.’”
“I have no idea how to get around this,” they added, “other than maybe feed it prose I already edited that’s technically mine? F**k.”
The thread, posted last week, has generated quite a bit of discussion by the subreddit’s standards, racking up over a hundred comments. Evidently, some of it was pretty heated, with dozens of replies removed by moderators. (“If you disagree with a post or the whole subreddit, be constructive to make it a nice place for all its members, including you,” a mod replied to some of the removed posts.)
Some shared their own workarounds for the AI’s refusals — which included just using another model, like Claude or Gemini.
Other more noble-minded AI writers pushed back on the idea of using the tech to mimic famous creatives.
“But why emulate any single author? Or a group for that matter. Why not understand the prose you want to achieve and use that?” one wrote.
“Try writing your own words,” read a heavily downvoted comment which apparently survived the moderator purge. “People have been copying styles for centuries without AI.”
Using AI to write is already controversial, and asking it to mimic authors even more so, given that the models were trained on millions of books without permission from the copyrightholders in the first place. Last year, the romance novelist Lena McDonald sparked a wave of backlash after readers noticed she accidentally left in an AI prompt asking it to crib the style of J. Bree, a popular author working in the same genre.
According to Ars, ChatGPT is now refusing style requests for both living and deceased authors. Now, the AI suggests users to capture an author’s “feeling” by integrating some of the hallmarks of their stories.
Given the backdrop of lawsuits the company is facing, it’s an important distinction, the reporting notes. Currently, copyright law doesn’t explicitly protect an artist’s “style,” which is nebulous and hard to define, but AI outputs generated with the explicit intent of mimic style could potentially cross the line into becoming more blatant theft. At least one proposed act would make an artist’s style copyrightable, ostensibly to protect them against AI.
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