Veteran journalists Nicholas Gage, 84, and Nicholas Basbanes, 81, who live near each other in the same Massachusetts town, each devoted decades to reporting, writing and book authorship.
Gage poured his tragic family story and search for the truth about his mother’s death into a bestselling memoir that led John Malkovich to play him in the 1985 film “Eleni.” Basbanes transitioned his skills as a daily newspaper reporter into writing widely-read books about literary culture.
Basbanes was the first of the duo to try fiddling with AI chatbots, finding them impressive but prone to falsehoods and lack of attribution. The friends commiserated and filed their lawsuit earlier this year, seeking to represent a class of writers whose copyrighted work they allege “has been systematically pilfered by” OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft.
“It’s highway robbery,” Gage said in an interview in his office next to the 18th-century farmhouse where he lives in central Massachusetts.
I’m familiar with that. Not in quite that way because our app is for roleplaying where there isn’t a prewritten story but we use a database to pull relevant info into context. You can definitely help it, but you need author chops to do it well.
Which means maybe this is a tool that could help good writers write faster, but it won’t make a poor writer into a good one. If for no reason other than you need to know how to steer and correct the output.