When I wrote “Is Output from ChatGPT A Derived Work“, the idea was to get people thinking and discussing the issue. There’s not much in the way of comments on the site, likely a function of WordPress.com’s painful way of adding comments for first timers. The Facebook conversation on my public post did get some bites and some thoughtful discussion, but it’s the odd response I’m writing about.

In a private conversation through Facebook messenger, I was made aware that one of my connections decided to feed some of my personal information into ChatGPT to have it write a poem about me – really, a rap song – and thought I would be pleased about it when the whole point of what I wrote was that it takes stuff from the Internet and creates derived works, which she did by sharing information about me. The last thing I really ever wanted was to feed any of these large language models information about myself. In fact, in that posting I linked to an article which even says you shouldn’t do that. How much more apparent should I have been?

I couldn’t be more apparent. It’s not on me. It’s the tragedy sometimes of writing when other people aren’t reading and just… well, to speculate would be unkind, and the point is not to be as unkind as she was, whether consciously or not. But it is annoying.

I don’t know why people are like this. People get so caught up in trying to say what they want at even the shortest prompting which isn’t meant to be a prompt for them, and it’s a reality. Just like the reality of algorithms and red dots driving people into manic sharing of things not relevant and sometimes even damaging. Caught up with themselves, even when one politely points out that (1) it wasn’t asked for, and (2) It runs contrary to what the article is about, they can do damage.

In this case, I imagine it’s quite slight, but it’s the principle of the thing. It’s not the first time it has happened to me, I don’t imagine it will be the last. In it’s own way, statistically, it means that at least the article was gaining attention, even the bad sort.

I don’t know what to do about these sorts of things and I’m open to ideas. We’ll take any sort of action that is immoral off the table since illegal has too much wiggle room because of a society that thinks laws create ethics instead of the other way around.