Tag: LinkedIn

News and Events

Scraping the bottom of the barrel

by Mary Morrissy3 Comments on Scraping the bottom of the barrel
Peter Finch in the film Network: Like him “I’m mad as hell!”

A top pick job for me, the LinkedIn algorithm promised. The firm was seeking fluent speakers of Irish English to record 15 short audio clips featuring natural greetings and voicemail-type messages. You’d be paid the princely sum – wait for it – US$15 for your labour. To add insult to injury, the recordings would be used to help speech recognition systems and AI language technologies. Reader, I saw red.

I had just discovered that all four of my novels and three collections of short fiction had been “scraped” – that is the term for digitally stealing copyrighted work – for training AI bots. Needless to say, no money had changed hands, and the only information I had about the pirating was that it had taken place. I’ve still no idea by whom.

Data mining by AI corporates is widespread and up to now, totally unregulated. Luckily, for us, there is evidence that a fightback has started in the US.

In August, a court challenge taken by voice actors became the first case involving AI to be settled – of a total of 48 copyright lawsuits in train. In Vacker v. Eleven Labs Inc, the actors claimed that Eleven Labs Inc had cloned their voices digitally without their permission. In another landmark case in September, the giant tech company Anthropic settled a class action taken by the Authors Guild in the US for illegal downloading of hundreds of thousands of books to train large language models (LLMs).

To avoid further litigation, Anthropic agreed to compensate authors from a $1.5bn settlement fund for work that had been pirated. Depending on the numbers claiming, writers could be paid $3,000 for each copyright infringement.

I discovered by chance that I was one of those authors. But there must be many Irish writers in the same boat, although to qualify for a payout your work must have been registered by your publisher with the US Copyright Office before Anthropic stole it.

“In practice,” Conor Kostick, writing on the Irish Writers Union website, explains,” this means that only Irish authors who have signed agreements with US publishers are likely to be included. And even then, not all publishers (by a long way) registered the works with the US Copyright Office.

“If you were pirated, used for AI training, but not registered with the US Copyright Office. . . don’t despair,” Kostick says. “There are European legal battles to come with these companies, ones which if we win, we all stand to benefit from. And the precedent of the Anthropic settlement makes it much more likely that in due course all of us will win compensation for the theft of our works”

These cases represent a head-on collision between so-called business”ethics” and the creative impulse. They’re a warning to the corporate world – writers’ and artists’ work is for sale, not for plundering. The creative arts are not just fodder for imitation content, but a unique and compelling way of being in the world.

Professor of Creative Writing at Yale and an author herself, Megan O’Rourke, writing in the New York Times in July, put it this way:”When I write, the process is full of risk, error and painstaking self-correction. It arrives somewhere surprising only when I’ve stayed in uncertainty long enough to find out what I had initially failed to understand. This attention to the world is worth trying to preserve: The act of care that makes meaning — or insight — possible.” 

It would be difficult to put a price on this kind of artistic concentration. The likes of Anthropic – and Eleven Labs Inc – didn’t even bother to try.

Writers often bitch about publishers and their advances, but in the publishing model, the concept of paying the artist is still, generally, part of the deal, no matter how paltry the sums may be. But with the AI giants, our work is valued so little that they don’t see the need to pay for it. And they’re using it to train AI systems that aim to replace our individualised creativity with deep fakes mimicking the very work they’ve mined for nothing.

If that isn’t the epitome of late capitalist greed and hubris, I don’t know what is.

So, no, LinkedIn, I won’t be taking up that top pick job so that some AI bot can undermine my livelihood and compromise my artistic authenticity. Not for 15 dollars a throw. Not for anything.

Check this link to see if your work qualifies for compensation – https://secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/lookup/.

Nostalgia

My future – as a Sandwich Artist

by Mary Morrissy6 Comments on My future – as a Sandwich Artist

I’m of a certain age. Post-retirement, that is – though when you’re a writer, you never actually retire; you just keep doing it till you drop. I also work as a manuscript editor and literary mentor (see The Deadline Desk page elsewhere on this site. ) As a result, I have a presence on social media and, harking back to my days as a freelance teacher and journalist, my various talents are listed on LinkedIn. When I was newly retired, I found it difficult to stop checking out job ads. Old habits die hard. It wasn’t all about a reluctance to relinquish my place as a useful member of the rat race. There was a vicarious satisfaction in looking at positions for which I would never have to submit my CV and jobs I’d never have to interview for.

What joy to never again have to engage in that false braggadocio of the performative interview! (They say be yourself at an interview; but when I played myself, I invariably didn’t get the job.) As a retiree, scouring the job ads had the same heart-in-mouth sensation of waking up from the classic nightmare and discovering that, no, you’re not sitting your Leaving Cert maths exam again. . . naked. Followed by a delicious sigh of relief.

But since I’ve stopped being a traditional job-hunter, I’ve noticed that the volume of work I’m considered suitable for on my LinkedIn feed has expanded exponentially. Jobs that someone (are there real people doing this anymore?) or some faceless algorithm is pumping my way.

Because I self-describe as a journalist and writer, most of the opportunities I’m offered are in those fields, or in academia where I spent the last 20 years of my career. Time was – particularly post-Crash – when as an out-of-work freelancer I would have welcomed this wealth of opportunities. Lately, though, the algorithms have gone rogue, because now my recommendations include a plethora of retail jobs in hamburger joints and fast food places. As a youngster, I worked in retail but that’s over 40 years ago. I wasn’t very good at it then and I doubt if my skills have improved in the meantime.

Supermarkets are often keen to employ more mature people, particularly on their tills. And perhaps the algorithms have been noting my age and thinking I might like a dinky little part-time job at a cash register in my golden years. Either way, it seems, some kind of weird profiling is going on.

I was pleased to see in the last week that some of the jobs were inching back towards my area of expertise – a prime example was an opening for a storyteller at the National Leprechaun Museum. . . mmn, close. I could see the logic of suggesting online tutoring work, but a part-time teacher of Hindi? But by far the strangest career move suggestion was to become a Sandwich Artist at Subway.

I kid you not. I suppose the word artist might appear somewhere in my CV or list of publications, but where the hell did the sandwich angle come in? Sure, I eat them, but that’s about the height of my expertise. I was nearly tempted to apply just out of sheer curiosity.

What does a Sandwich Artist at Subway do? And what unique offering could I bring to the position? Dash off a few oil paintings of breakfast rolls? Craft installations using bread and assorted fillings? Do live performances with ham? Write a novel from the point of a view of a sliced pan?

The Sandwich Artist role immediately prompted images from my childhood of sandwich board men (they were almost always men). They walked the streets strapped into a matching pair of advertising boards, front and back. Sandwich boards gained popularity in the 19th century, but they’ve been supplanted by large-scale advertising which is aimed at car-drivers rather than pedestrians, and electronic billboards which appeal to our more sophisticated visual senses. The sandwich board, on the other hand, is predominantly text and information-based. You still see sandwich boards outside establishments in the city centre, but generally not with a human attached.

Incidentally, the term “sandwich men” for the mobile human advertiser was, apparently, first coined by author Charles Dickens. He described them as “a piece of human flesh between two slices of paste board”. Now, with branding, we’ve all become walking advertisements. And the sandwich artists are the ones inside “creating” rolls for Subway.