The other day, The Atlantic published an article about Meta training its generative AI on pirated versions of published books. (Here’s a link to the searchable database of books that doesn’t require a subscription.) I searched the database, as one does, and found out that my first book is included. I’ve been trying to figure out how to feel about it ever since.
My initial response was to lament that not even the robots read my second book. It was soon followed by some grim little sense of accomplishment or relevance, the same feeling that’s the subtext of so much of the response: writers (myself, obviously, included) will brag about being picked for literally anything. I also felt some of the outrage that’s been expressed by many others. I’m not happy that a tech behemoth I detest used my work without consent for purposes I would never have consented to. I’m more upset that they did so without compensating me.
That said, I’m not sure how much I agree with that outrage. The main objection seems to be about ownership and copyright, which is a more flawed and complicated idea than the collective response would have you believe. Anne Trubek’s recent post on the subject makes that point better and from a more informed perspective than I could.
I’ve done a lot of reading on copyright law. I wish more other writers would. My impression is that copyright is mostly bullshit. Unless you’re Disney or something, good luck trying to get compensated if your intellectual property is infringed.1 Even if the class-action suit filed by Sarah Silverman and others succeeds, its only going to make money for the lawyers involved. Meta has too much money and power, and too many lawyers on retainer, to worry about lawsuits. They also have too much at stake. Whoever wins the AI arms race is going to have a kind of power previously unimaginable even to Meta, a company that already sways elections and exerts supragovernmental influence across the world.
But I also don’t want to be gratuitously contrarian here and argue that this is all somehow a good thing. That entirely predictable take has already been published, and while I agree with some of what he says—particularly his point about pretentiousness playing a big role in this—I’m not exactly compelled to cheer for the corporate robots.
It doesn’t really matter how I feel about it. That’s sort of the point. This latest news seems inevitable, the next regularly scheduled outrage on the ChatGPT beat, another step along the same path we’ve been traveling for as long as I’ve been alive, maybe since Gutenberg. What at one point in time seem to be shared, inviolable ideas about truth and authorship and the role of writing in society become antiquated and irrelevant seemingly overnight. The pace of those changes does seem to be accelerating, but, to quote Sylvia Plath, we’ve boarded the train there’s no getting off.
Since I found out my book was scraped, the only consistent thought I have about it has been sort of weird and ironic. I wrote my first book, a memoir about my mother’s life and death, partly as a doomed and naive attempt at making her immortal. That’s one of the delusions writers operate under, that our work will survive us. But even the most successful books fade from memory within a few years.2 Most never get noticed at all. Now one of the first artificial intelligences has consumed my mother’s story in a way I don’t understand, but which will, in some miniscule sense, inform the way it writes from now on. That might be the closest thing to immortality we can hope for.
Meat, water, & the lack thereof
I read a few books this month, but am not going to write much about them. One was the wild memoir-ish account of an early frontiersman and miner in New Mexico, which entertained me but will probably not interest many others. The other two were recent literary novels, acclaimed at the time of their release, and both of them reminded me why I rarely read contemporary literary novels.
Maybe the best thing I read this month was this excerpt (paywalled, sorry) of a new book about the water crisis in the West. Being back in the Southwest has made me conscious of water again; it’s unavoidable, especially since lately I’ve been in rural areas that rely on wells. Most of them are also close to mining concerns that pollute the water with arsenic, lead, and god knows what else. (I grew up in an old silver town with piles of toxic tailings all over the place; we used to jump our bikes off of them.) Sometimes you can taste the water and know it’s dirty.
Anyway, that article describes the confusion of living in the West, downstream of and dependent on rivers, in the time that I did. My family arrived in Arizona in 1987, a time when water seemed abundant; as the piece describes, it has since become clear that it’s running out faster than anyone expected, and that the cities I lived in, and where most of the people I love still live, are on borrowed time.
I was especially struck by one paragraph that explains why:
I found it unsettling to learn that the entire water crisis in the American West comes down to cows eating alfalfa in a landscape where neither belongs. That the delta of the Colorado could be reborn with the water that today goes to produce a third of 1 percent of the nation's cattle production. That the federal government sets aside 250 million acres of open land for ranchers who produce less than 10 percent of America's beef. That no amount of water conservation in the home, on the golf course, or in the swimming pools and fountains of Los Angeles and Las Vegas will make a difference as long as half of the country's water supply is used to fatten cattle.
With a few poultry exceptions I’ll get to in a second, I haven’t eaten meat in six years. I realize that probably sounds sanctimonious, but mentioning the topic generally does to meat-eaters, who in my experience tend to fly off the handle at the mere mention of vegetarianism.3 Not eating meat was the easy part. The hard one is having to deal with people who do.
I learned early not to say I was vegetarian, lest my friends who eat more meat than the Hamburglar call me a hypocrite for sometimes eating fish. (The other response, to claim they’re basically plant-based, often while eating meat, is only slightly less annoying.) I try not to mention the subject unless I’m eating at someone’s house, and even then, I try never to get preachy about it.
But really, we should all eat less meat. You don’t have to be a vegetarian. I’m not—I eat fish, eggs, tons of cheese, and very occasionally fowl. I didn’t even stop eating meat because of climate change. It was some combination of practicality (I was living with two vegans at the time), health, the grossness of American meat,4 the ethics of factory farming, the availability of good alternatives, and the environmental reasons. Mostly it just seemed hard to come up with reasons why I should eat so much meat.
All I’m saying is that if you’ve asked yourself that question, you should try eating less meat. It’s easy. I promise. And it’s probably the simplest and most impactful thing you can personally do about climate change.
Hot chicken
Until recently the only exceptions to my pescetarianism were a few times I’d indulged in Thanksgiving turkey, which was always my favorite holiday food. Then I wound up in Memphis, where I happened to be staying a block from a Hattie B’s. I’d never had real Tennessee hot chicken.5 You could smell it all across the neighborhood; my dog was going nuts. I literally could not resist.
The first time I tried their hottest flavor, like an asshole. My face sweat for a solid hour afterward and it felt like I’d been punched in the solar plexus. The second time I downgraded to the second-hottest. The third I surrendered my pride and just got regular hot, which was spectacular, the best by far.
So now I don’t eat meat unless it’s Thanksgiving or I’m on the premises of Hattie B’s. In which case, I’ll take a three-piece hot with pimento mac & cheese, black-eyed pea salad,6 and a 40 of High Life.
Airbnbs suck, except this one
For the last two months I’ve been wandering the country, staying mostly in Airbnbs. You may have heard that Airbnbs have gotten worse, and I’m here to assure you that is true. (Although so have hotels: the other night, in the witching hour, I overheard a thirty-minute conversation between a meth dealer and his love interest conducted in the hallway of a Tulsa La Quinta.) Too many of the places I’ve been staying are the kind of apartments I would’ve lived in during college, spruced up with accent walls and cheugy decor—signs reminding me to flush the toilet, brush my teeth, breathe, eat, live, laugh, love—run by small-time slumlords who can’t spell.
But once in a while, you can still get lucky. I’m writing this in a hundred-and-forty-year-old adobe in rural New Mexico, thirty miles from the nearest gas station, in a town where you have to climb the hill to the graveyard to get a cell signal, and leave your car’s hood open at night so the mice don’t eat your wiring. The internet’s too slow to stream anything, but it has a well-curated library, a small TV, and the Criterion version of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. It’s also a few miles from the Gila Wilderness, which has some of the best hiking in the world. I would live here if I could.
If you ever need a writing getaway, you can rent it here. (It’s dog-friendly!)
Go Phils!
In honor of my Phillies winning their first playoff game last night, I’ll leave you with their postseason playlist from last year, created by backup catcher and all-around mensch Garrett Stubbs. It is so much hornier than it has any right to be.
The infamous case of Mickey Mouse has helped define contemporary copyright law.
As much as I’m not a fan of literary awards, sometimes I’ll skim the list of recipients from before, say, ten years ago. For the National Book Awards, which only go back to 1950, I’ve never heard of half of the winners.
Although not nearly as much as people with kids do if you say you’ve chosen not to have them. I have ruined multiple dinner parties by bringing up this book.
I’d mostly stopped eating beef a few years before, after a restaurant burger gave me food poisoning so bad that I was delirious for a full day and woke up afterward not remembering any of it.
Technically I think it’s a Nashville specialty, but Hattie B’s is a Nashville-based chain. Also, while I’ve never been to Nashville, I believe the Memphians who’ve told me their city is better at everything, especially food.
All their other sides have pork. My hypocrisy knows some bounds.
20 years teaching writing? How is possible that either of us are old enough for you to type that?! I love this monthly bit from you - truly a highlight for me. Enjoy the journey and the wildness and if you are in Tucson I owe you dinner.
Impressive work with the triple take, Justin. The realm of artificial intelligence remains enigmatic to me, even as I delve into using ChatGPT for newsletter refinement and experiment with Adobe's generative text-to-illustrations feature. I find myself grappling daily with the fundamentals. The implications for copyright law are a mystery as well, particularly when considering that lawmakers in government, who may be even less informed about these ramifications than I am, are shaping the future. Predicting the outcome is uncertain at best. (ChatGPT cleaned this up for me.)