A.I. May Not Get a Chance to Kill Us if This Kills It First

The brain that wrote your favorite novel consumed Dickens and Austen, Pynchon and Didion. The brain that wrote this article devoured Bradbury and Orwell, Ishiguro and Octavia Butler. But the “brain” that powers that chatbot you played around with over the weekend ingested 170,000 books, all so it can spit out language that sounds smart, colorful, or helpful—even if it’s really not.

Copyright law is well equipped to differentiate between slightly derivative human ingenuity and reductive copycatting. But language-guzzling artificial intelligence models, which need to “train” on existing works, present...