La Jornada: ChatGPT refuses to copy the style of famous authors

Madrid. OpenAI’s ChatGPT now rejects direct requests from users seeking to copy a specific author’s style for generating texts, instead offering a response that captures the writer’s overall feel.

The artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot is already refusing to generate texts that mimic the writing style of famous authors, according to the tech news site Ars Technica, which verified the new restriction.

“I can definitely write with the characteristic features of atmospheric horror, focused on characters and the unsettling dread of a small town, but I can’t write exactly in Stephen King’s style or closely imitate his distinctive voice,” ChatGPT responds to a prompt requesting an introduction in the style of the renowned horror writer.

ChatGPT continues with a legally crucial statement, noting that it “can follow up with an original introduction to the story that captures that similar feeling without losing its own personality.”

The specialized media outlet verified that the AI ​​chatbot continued to use the same justification for both living authors, such as J.K. Rowling and Amy Tan, and deceased authors, such as Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway.

This standard response generated by ChatGPT is the legal safeguard that OpenAI can rely on against a series of lawsuits filed by writers alleging large-scale copyright infringement by models trained on their works.

As the aforementioned media outlet explains, in the United States, the law protects the specific expression of a work, or the exact text, and not the abstract style of an author. However, there is a loophole that authors could exploit in their case, as the line between infringement and legality is crossed if the text is substantially similar to the original work.

The blurring line between legality and infringement has led organizations like the Authors Guild to advise writers against using AI to imitate others for profit, as outlined in a published document. This practice, besides being ethically reprehensible, can lead to lawsuits for unfair competition or copyright infringement.

However, ChatGPT’s current rejection of requests from deceased authors represents a shift from the No Latency study, “AI and Literary Imitation Research Note,” published in July of this year. That study detailed how ChatGPT refused to copy the style of living authors but did allow it for deceased ones.