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In January, two journalists and authors sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. Their suit, while similar in its claims to others filed by heavyweight newspapers and authors, garnered attention for its particularities: the plaintiffs were both named Nick, live near each other in Massachusetts, and are in their eighties. Last month, the Associated Press noted all these facts at the top of an article about their case. One of the journalists, Nick Basbanes, told me recently that the AP’s lede was accurate, but added, with a chuckle, that he wishes it had chosen a different one. “We age,” he said. “It is one fact of life.”
Another fact, according to Basbanes and his fellow plaintiff, Nick Gage, is that AI companies’ use of published journalism to train their large-language models (teaching them, in effect, to write like humans) is ethically and legally wrong. “I pay for the privilege of acquiring journalism,” Basbanes told me. “These people don’t. The way I look at it, it’s outright theft.” Their case has been folded into a class action, brought by nonfiction and fiction writers represented by the Authors Guild. But there is something distinctive and refreshing about Basbanes’s perspective, one not mired in tech jargon or legalese. “I am not a technologist, but I’m fully aware of what’s going on,” Basbanes told me. (AI firms have denied any wrongdoing—and in general terms, how copyright law might apply to them involves some complex issues, as CJR’s Mathew Ingram has written. The case including Basbanes and Gages’s claim is still making its way through the legal system.)
Another part of what makes Basbanes’s perspective refreshing is that he is an expert bibliophile—one who sees books and paper as forms of technology. (Maybe he is a technologist after all.) He is not hostile toward AI itself: indeed, he uses it for translation and transcription, and is fascinated by its use in deciphering ancient texts. And he does not see AI as being all that different from other technologies that have helped keep people informed throughout history. For him, it all comes down to the integrity with which technology is used. “The technology that we carry along with us is wonderful,” he says. “The skills, ethics, and principles that you have to apply to the tools that you use, they don’t change. The techniques don’t change; the tools may.”
Basbanes has dedicated much of his nearly sixty-year career to reviews, columns, and features about literature. He has written ten books—many of them about books. “Everything that I do as a writer stems from book culture,” he told me. John Updike once called him “the bibliophilia expert.” Over his career, Basbanes has amassed over three hundred and fifty hours of recorded interviews with authors, at least three hundred and sixty-five boxes of notes, and more than twenty thousand books. He knows these figures because, in 2015, he gave much of his personal archive to the Cushing Memorial Library at Texas A&M University, which houses his work alongside that of Walt Whitman and Rudyard Kipling. He donated an additional five thousand books, which were added to the tractor trailer headed to Texas, but that hardly scratched the surface of his personal collection. “The next day, it looked like nothing had left the house,” Basbanes says. When I asked him which book from his collection he was most fond of, he equivocated. “You reach a certain age in life where you begin to collect not by addition,” he said, “but by subtraction.”
It may seem curious to think of books and paper as forms of technology in an age of pocket supercomputers and machines that “think,” write jokes, and play active roles in war. But books are an information delivery system so practical that their form hasn’t changed all that much in thousands of years; they’ve been in the hands of Mesopotamians and Generation Alpha alike. In 2013, Basbanes wrote On Paper, a book about the cultural history of that product as a world-altering technological advancement. He referred to its introduction two thousand years ago as “a paradigm shift,” noting that its impact was significant everywhere it went. Aside from the proliferation of the written word, paper revolutionized hygiene, recordkeeping, architecture, and engineering. Basbanes posits that its impact cannot be overstated. We still use an inordinate amount of it in the digital age. As Basbanes told my colleague Jon Allsop in a 2018 interview, “toilet paper is a booming business.”
Generative AI is itself a booming business. The difference is that its progress is better measured in weeks and months than in hundreds of years. There has been a lot of speculation about how AI is going to change the world and, more narrowly, journalism. Transcription, translation, and many types of data work are already known use cases. But can it do the job of writers? A friend of Basbanes’s, who is a teacher, recently asked her students if they wanted her to use AI for their college recommendations or let her write the letters herself. You don’t need ChatGPT or my help to determine their preference. “Writing is the human expression of language, and writing is uniquely human,” Basbanes says. “Are they taking my thoughts and [those of] ten thousand other writers, and coming up with a hybrid ‘voice’? It’s going to be a computerized voice.”
Basbanes is now working on a prequel to On Paper, called Before Paper, about the materials that were used to hold markings for the three thousand years of writing prior to paper’s creation. Most of that writing is lost, but in some cases, marked-up substrates are still kicking around, though in far too fragile a state to handle, let alone read. That was, until researchers began applying AI to the problem. In February, researchers with digital scanners and AI readers began to decipher the Herculaneum scrolls—inscribed papyrus found in the ash of Mount Vesuvius before it buried the town and neighboring Pompeii. Basbanes is “far more interested in the 21st-century technologies that are being used to access and to unlock” such texts than the papyrus itself. (It helps that new technologies—the internet, digital archives, video calls, AI—shave time from the research process, a luxury to someone familiar with trips back and forth to library reference sections.)
Basbanes’s first book, A Gentle Madness, was a love letter of sorts to the history and art of book-collecting through profiles of great collectors. The subtitle—Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books—reads like an appropriately self-aware personal assessment save for the term “bibliomanes,” which refers to people who compulsively collect or hoard books to their own detriment. One of the book’s subjects is Stephen Blumberg, an avid book thief who is said to have stolen twenty-three thousand books at a value of roughly five million dollars. The compulsion to hoard tomes seems relevant in the context of large language model learning. But there is a difference between stolen books on a shelf and a vast dataset where the texts have quietly been separated from their bindings.
The world of data, of course, needn’t disaggregate books. Using WorldCat, a worldwide library database managed by the nonprofit OCLC, Basbanes can see that A Gentle Madness is available at sixteen hundred libraries worldwide. Knowing that his words are available to so many readers, with his name attached and in his voice, is the kind of exposure and mass access to his work that he lives for. By contrast, AI uses a computerized voice, approximating a humanity that it leveraged from so many great authors. Basbanes hopes that his AI lawsuit is “resolved in my lifetime,” he says, and that it results in “accountability to protect going forward, and compensation for what’s been wrongfully taken for me, for my friends, and for any number of other writers who have been severely abused.”
But what about the future of the physical book? Even before AI, the digital age wiped out the need for certain types of paper. (When was the last time you saw a phone book, let alone used one?) But other forms have survived. “Works of the creative spirit, the works of imagination, fiction, poetry, fine printing… books are beautiful objects in and of themselves,” Basbanes says. “There’s a tactility. You pick up a beautiful book—not only is it a pleasure to look at, it’s a pleasure to hold. If that moves you, then you understand what drives certain people to book madness: why they do things like Blumberg, who steals twenty thousand rare books; why they buy them or risk their fortunes.” He adds, “I don’t think you can ever fall in love with a website or an electronic text.”
Basbanes did come back to my question about his favorite book in his collection. In a glassed bookcase in his home, he has a three-volume set of The Bibliographical Decameron, published in 1817 by the Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin, who coined the phrase “bibliomania” and is, in some ways, an intellectual forefather to Basbanes. Basbanes’s copy of this Decameron has exquisite paper, leather binding, gilt edges, marble endsheets, and great resonance for him. (It did not go to Texas.) It reminds him of A Gentle Madness—his own madness, as well as the book itself. When Basbanes got his hands on the first copy of his first book, fresh from the printers, it was as special a day for him as the birth of his first child. “I am glad I was seated,” he said.
Other notable stories:
- Yesterday marked twelve years since Austin Tice, an American journalist, was abducted while reporting in Syria. In a statement, President Joe Biden reiterated a call for Tice to be released and said that his administration has “repeatedly pressed” the Syrian government to cooperate, but in the White House briefing room, Karine Jean-Pierre, the press secretary, declined to comment on whether there’d been any progress up to now. According to Michael Wilner of McClatchy, where Tice worked as a freelancer, media executives and other supporters are growing frustrated with the lack of a resolution. “Missed windows are a huge reason Austin is still missing after 12 long years,” Debra Tice, his mother, said. “We are in a window now. Our government must act now.”
- According to Semafor’s Max Tani, more job cuts are coming at New York Public Radio: LaFontaine Oliver, the organization’s CEO, said yesterday that WNYC will soon reduce its staff by a minimum of 8 percent, claiming that its “ability to continue to serve New York” is at stake. In other news about the audio business, the Boston Globe hired three people to launch a weekly podcast—but then U-turned on the plan, after concluding that it was not an effective way to juice paid subscriptions. The Globe is reportedly finding alternative roles for the hires; CommonWealth Beacon has more. And Wirecutter, the product-review site owned by the New York Times, will launch a podcast next week.
- Unionized staffers at the Baltimore Sun rallied yesterday in protest of alleged “union busting” on the part of management as well as the paper’s publication of content from a local station owned by Sinclair, whose chairman acquired the Sun this year. In other local-news news, a reporter at the Cody Enterprise, in Wyoming, resigned after a rival paper spotted fabricated quotes in his stories that turned out to have stemmed from his use of AI. And the former police chief who led the raid at the Marion County Record in Kansas last year was charged with obstruction of justice, as we previewed last week.
- Earlier this year, Meta said that it would shut down CrowdTangle, a tool widely used by researchers and journalists to monitor the spread of content, including misinformation, on Meta’s platforms; dozens of groups urged Meta to reconsider, or at least keep the tool running through the election, but this week, the company turned it off. Meta has released an alternative tool, but for now, most newsrooms can’t use it. Per the AP, “critics have also complained that it’s not as useful as CrowdTangle—at least not yet.”
- And Minouche Shafik resigned as president of Columbia University after a little over a year in the job. Her tenure was marked, as we reported earlier this year, by sharp divisions over her handling of Gaza solidarity protests on campus, which resulted in Shafik authorizing the police to arrest demonstrators. The Columbia Spectator, the student paper that led the way in covering that episode, has more on Shafik’s departure.
New from CJR: 1968 All Over Again
Correction: A previous version of this piece misstated the number of hours of recorded interviews Basbanes has done with authors.
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