++Large language models are disrupting the publishing industry, from spam submissions to garbage books. +
++AI is, in theory, poised to disrupt work as we know it now. But it’s still facing the same problem every buzzy new tech product before it has faced: The VC funding is there, but the long-term business model is not, particularly for individuals. What do you do with a large language model AI at this stage, when all you know for sure is that it will produce text to order, in varying degrees of accuracy? +
++One fairly straightforward response is to try to sell that text. Preferably, you would want to sell it someplace where it doesn’t matter whether it’s accurate or not, or even where inaccuracy could become fiction and hence valuable: the book market. The book market is also, conveniently, the last textual medium where users are still in the habit of paying directly (even just a tiny bit). Publishing is currently the weak point that bad-faith AI users are trying to infiltrate. +
++Legally speaking, you can’t sell AI-generated text, because text generated by machines is not subject to copyright (with some exceptions). Nevertheless, the scammers and grifters who circulate along publishing’s underbelly are integrating AI into their existing scams and grifts. Publishers are reportedly investigating ways of using AI in discreet, closed-door meetings. And authors are on the alert for anything that looks like a smoking gun to take down what many of them believe to be an existential threat to their craft. +
++It started in January, when science fiction magazines reported that they were being flooded with AI-generated submissions. Editors believed “side hustle” influencers were recommending that their followers use AI to generate short stories and then sell them, apparently under the belief that short story writers pull in big bucks. In December 2022, explained Clarkesworld editor Neil Clarke, the magazine received 50 fraudulent submissions; in the first half of February 2023, they received almost 350. +
++By July, the Author’s Guild was becoming concerned. Large language models are trained off large piles of text. A Meta white paper named one popular corpus used to train large language models; that corpus includes text scraped from so-called “shadow libraries,” large collections of pirated books. How was that not copyright infringement? +
++“We understand that many of the books used to develop AI systems originated from notorious piracy websites,” the Author’s Guild wrote in an open letter to the CEOs of various AI companies. “It is only fair that you compensate us for using our writings, without which AI would be banal and extremely limited.” +
++The letter went on to call for the CEOs to get permission for their use of copyrighted material for AI programming, compensate writers for past and ongoing use of their work in training AI, and compensate them further for the use of their work under AI output. +
++The Guild had reason to be concerned. The same kind of side-hustle influencer who advised their audience to start sending AI-generated stories to literary magazines has also begun advising their audience to start selling AI-generated ebooks on Amazon. +
++“Making money with Amazon KDP is a numbers game,” advises one such post. “Clever side hustlers can target a particular niche, and leverage AI to produce multiple books quickly while slowly racking in those sweet royalties.” +
++“Targeting a particular niche” can sometimes get very specific — as specific as, say, “targeting the niche of people interested in a particular author’s books by pretending to be that author.” In August, the writer Jane Friedman reported that “garbage books” she’d never seen before were getting sold on Amazon under her name and had been added to her Goodreads profile. The books read, she said, exactly like what ChatGPT spits out when prompted with her name. If it was, that means an AI trained on Friedman’s corpus (without compensating her) was now generating new text to be sold under her name (again without compensating her). +
++“Whoever’s doing this is obviously preying on writers who trust my name and think I’ve actually written these books,” Friedman wrote. +
++Neither of these schemes is precisely new. There have been “garbage books” for sale on Amazon for a long time: plagiarized books and books with stolen text run through Google Translate a few times and books with straight gobbledygook as the text. It’s not unheard of for those books to have the byline of a legitimate author, all the better to trick unsuspecting readers into buying them. Likewise, people have sent plagiarized submissions to literary magazines for a long time. +
++What’s new right now is the scale of the operation. AI makes it easy for scammers and side hustlers to do their work in massive quantities. +
++In July, authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey joined Sarah Silverman in filing a class action lawsuit against OpenAI and Meta, alleging that the companies used multiple books, including Silverman’s memoir, as part of their training sets. +
++Authors, Geraldine Brooks declared at the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival this month, “are the ones who should be going on strike.” She was increasingly concerned that none of her contracts had any language in them about AI. +
++It was in the midst of this increasingly agitated atmosphere that the website Prosecraft emerged into the spotlight in early August. A product of software company Shaxpir that went live in 2019, Prosecraft ranks books based on how many words they have, how often they use passive voice, how often they use adjectives, and the vividness of their language. Its database includes analytics for many books already under copyright, although it does not include their text. +
++“This company Prosecraft appears to have stolen a lot of books, trained an AI, and are now offering a service based on that data,” wrote novelist Hari Kunzru on Twitter. +
++Prosecraft doesn’t use AI. It uses an algorithm without any generative AI properties. It’s also not particularly profitable. According to creator Benji Smith, it “has never generated any income.” Still, authors en masse saw it as just more of the same urgent threat they were already facing: a slick tech interface no one asked for, all its value scraped from their own work, without their permission. Facing a virulent outcry on social media, Smith took Prosecraft down. +
++Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that about 50 companies that actually do use AI to create, package, edit, and market books have launched over the past year. An irony here is that publishing is a business of notoriously low margins, and those margins are getting smaller. A 2018 Authors Guild survey found that the median annual income for authors was $6,080, down from $12,850 in 2007. It also found that only 21 percent of full-time published authors derived 100 percent of their individual income from book-related income, and for those who did, the median income was $20,300. +
++The people who tell our stories are already stretched very, very thin. As a culture, we have spent decades undervaluing their labor, treating writing as a passion project that does not deserve remuneration rather than skilled labor that ought to come with a paycheck. +
++Now, AI has become a powerful tool for grifters to use to try to vacuum up the little money we do award to writers. The side hustle hustles on. +
++No, incandescent lightbulbs aren’t banned. +
++Last week, a series of flashy headlines announced the start of a “ban” on incandescent light bulbs — the classic round bulbs you most likely imagine floating above someone’s head when they have a brilliant idea. These pieces offered advice on how to prepare, outlined exceptions, and pointed out how the change would save money and the environment. +
++Yet, for all the useful and accurate information out there, most of these stories got one essential fact wrong, the experts Vox spoke to agreed. +
++“It’s not a ban,” Mark Lien, an industry relations consultant for the nonprofit Illuminating Engineering Society, and Andrew deLaski, the executive director of the advocacy organization Appliance Standards Awareness Project, told Vox in separate conversations. Both went on to describe the incandescent lightbulb-limiting guidelines as an “efficiency standard.” +
++The roots of the modern incandescent bulb can be traced back to the 1800s and, by the 1920s, most American homes in urban areas were illuminated with them. But, given incandescents emit light by heating a wire filament until it glows, the average bulb converts around 90 percent of the electricity it consumes into heat, not light — meaning they’re not very efficient. +
++In contrast, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) use the electricity fueling them more efficiently. This type of lighting uses a microchip and was first developed in the 1960s. It wasn’t until 1994, however, that Nobel Physics honorees Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura developed a bright blue LED light, which would pave the way for further developments in the space. Today, LEDs exist in a range of colors and brightness levels. +
++The standard now requires light bulbs to emit at least 45 lumens (a measure of brightness) per watt. An average LED light emits at least 75 lumens per watt, while incandescent bulbs only emit 12 to 18 lumens per watt while using more energy. Switching from the classic incandescent to the new-age LEDs may sound like a big change, but, at the end of the day, most consumers probably didn’t notice anything different when the efficiency standard went into effect earlier this month. +
++“Most major retailers stopped selling incandescent light bulbs earlier this year,” said deLaski. “Most people didn’t notice, but you really haven’t seen incandescent light bulbs on most store shelves for a long time.” +
++The history of the standard +
++In 2007, Congress enacted — with President George W. Bush’s signature — the Energy Independence and Security Act, which mandated the phaseout of inefficient bulbs in two stages. +
++The first stage, between 2012 and 2014, required freshly sold bulbs to be about 25 percent more efficient than the market standard at the time. That first year, the 100-watt incandescent bulb had to be taken off the market (businesses were allowed to sell any remaining inventory but could not buy and sell the bulbs from manufacturers). In 2013, the efficiency regulations booted out the 75-watt incandescent bulb, and by 2014, 40- and 60-watt bulbs were also out, leaving LEDs, and the less popular 43, 72, and 150-watt incandescent bulbs. +
++“It just happens that the really inefficient lamps can’t meet the efficiency requirements, but they never banned incandescence,” said Lien, who as the director of government-industry relations for lighting manufacturer Osram and a member of the National Electrical Manufacturers Association helped develop the future energy efficiency benchmarks in 2015. +
++The Department of Energy planned to release the final efficiency standard by the start of 2017. While the department couldn’t do so for bureaucratic reasons, the interim “backstop” standard required that all bulbs had to emit at least 45 lumens per watt, said deLaski. The Trump administration blocked this backstop from taking effect, hence delays in the final phaseout. +
++However, in April 2022, President Biden’s Department of Energy reinstated the guidelines, saying the backstop was valid. It took a little over a year to push out the final (and current) efficiency standard where any manufactured and sold bulbs must have at least 45 lumens per watt. Since businesses knew since last April the standard would go into effect, they had months to sell off any inventory that did not meet these guidelines. +
++A misconception about this regulation and its history is that it was always aimed at cutting incandescents out of the market. In 2007, when the guidelines were first made, there was hope that incandescents, fluorescents, and LEDs could reach and exceed the future efficiency standard, said deLaski. +
++“The standard was set at a level that any of those three technologies could have met it,” deLaski added. As a result, manufacturers invested in all three technologies in what deLaski called a “technological foot race” to create the most efficient bulbs. In the mid-2010s, it became clear that LEDs were far better than their counterparts, he said. +
++“[Efficiency standards] drive innovation. This is a great story about innovation here that’s kind of been untold,” said deLaski. “When Congress set that standard back in 2007 … it unleashed a wave of investments and innovation on the part of manufacturers to develop that low-cost, high-quality LED that we have on the shelves today.” +
++What the standard does and does not do +
++Consumers don’t need to rush to the store to replace any incandescent bulbs currently in use in their homes. The standard only applies to the sale (not use) of bulbs, and there are some notable exceptions (although President Biden did expand the scope of the regulation to include more light sources). +
++Types of incandescent lights excluded from the standard include but are not limited to appliance lamps, black lights, bug lamps, infrared lamps, plant lights, flood lights, reflector lamps, and traffic signals. +
++Overall, the standard is set to save consumers $3 billion on utility bills annually and cut 222 million metric tons of carbon emissions over the next three decades. +
++Still, some people aren’t happy about the standard. Consumers’ concerns stem from two places, said Lien. There are those that dislike LEDs because “it’s change,” and those who hold a “stigma” against the lights because of the low quality of early models, he said. +
++“LED, it’s turning into a wonderful general light source, it’s evolving to that point, but there are still things that it’s not capable of doing well,” said Lien. For example, while LEDs perform well in cool environments, they don’t perform well in heat, so they can’t be used as oven lights. +
++Misconceptions and fallacies about LED’s propensity to flicker and the unsubstantiated claims that they can be harmful prosper in some circles. “There are still a few people that are just absolutely opposed to LEDs,” said Lien. “And they have some misconceptions about how LEDs give off a tremendous amount of blue light at night that hurts people. Those stories get a lot of attention, but they’re not accurate.” +
++These LED haters would appear to be in the minority. While some manufacturers may take issue with the efficiency standard, Lien says at the time the 45-lumen watt standard was set years ago, there was consensus among the major players that this was an achievable benchmark. +
++“I think what’s been misunderstood somewhat is that LEDs were winning in the marketplace, even before this standard took effect,” said deLaski. “And that’s because consumers liked them. They prefer them because they save them money, they provide the same or better light as the bulbs they replace, and they last 10 to 25 times longer.” +
++Two conservative lawyers make a strong 14th Amendment argument. But the politics of their theory are very, very dicey. +
++Two conservative legal scholars, members of the Federalist Society in good standing, have just published an audacious argument: that Donald Trump is constitutionally prohibited from running for president, and that state election officials have not only the authority but the legal obligation to prevent his name from appearing on the ballot. +
++The legal paper, authored by University of Chicago professor William Baude and University of St. Thomas professor Michael Stokes Paulsen, centers on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — a provision that limits people from returning to public office if they have since “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or “given aid or comfort” to those who have. Baude and Paulsen argue that this clearly covers Trump’s behavior between November 2020 and January 2021. +
++“The most politically explosive application of Section Three to the events of January 6, is at the same time the most straightforward,” Baude and Paulsen write. “Former President Donald J. Trump is constitutionally disqualified from again being President (or holding any other covered office) because of his role in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election and the events leading to the January 6 attack.” +
++The consequences of this argument are astonishing. On Baude and Paulsen’s read, Section 3 is “self-executing” — meaning it does not require an act of Congress to enter force and binds those public officials in the position to act on its dictates. Basically, if a single official anywhere in the US electoral system finds their constitutional analysis compelling, Baude and Paulsen urge them to act on it. +
++“No official should shrink from these duties. It would be wrong — indeed, arguably itself a breach of one’s constitutional oath of office — to abandon one’s responsibilities of faithful interpretation, application, and enforcement of Section Three,” they write. +
++As a matter of law, I find their arguments quite compelling. If you look at Section 3 in light of the historical evidence and how restrictions on eligibility for office work elsewhere in the Constitution, it’s hard to disagree with Baude and Paulen’s application of its text to Trump. +
++But as a matter of politics, encouraging state election officials to go rogue and kick Trump off the ballot is a recipe for disaster. And that disconnect, between what the law says and the practical barriers to implementing it, speaks to some deep problems in American democracy that led to Trump’s insurrection in the first place. +
++The (very strong) argument that Trump is ineligible for office +
++Baude and Paulsen’s paper, set to be published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, focusing on plain-language readings on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment and the way its key terms were used in political discussion around the time of enactment. +
++To get what they’re trying to do, it’s worth reading the text of Section 3 in full: +
++++No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. +
+
+Using historical and dictionary sources, Baude and Paulsen establish clear definitions for key terms. “Insurrection” and “rebellion,” in their view, “cover pretty much the entire terrain of large-scale unlawful resistance to government authority.” To have “engaged in” such conduct, they claim, means being “actively involved in the planning or execution of intentional acts of insurrection or rebellion” or “knowingly provided active, meaningful, voluntary, direct support for, material assistance to, or specific encouragement of such actions.” +
++If this interpretation is correct, then the legal case against Trump is fairly straightforward — all established by facts in public reporting, evidence from the January 6 committee, and the recent federal indictment. +
++In this well-known story, Trump was “actively involved” in an extralegal scheme to send fake electors to the Congress, and urged the vice president to unlawfully accept these fake electors over the real ones and crown Trump president. In service of his scheme, he provided “direct support for” and “specific encouragement” of the mob that ransacked the Capitol on January 6 in his speech, his tweets, private statements, and refusal to take actions (like calling in the National Guard) that could have stopped the mob. +
++“The bottom line is that Donald Trump both ‘engaged in’ ‘insurrection or rebellion’ and gave ‘aid or comfort’ to others engaging in such conduct, within the original meaning of those terms as employed in Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Baude and Paulsen write. “If the public record is accurate, the case is not even close.” +
++Normally, this kind of argument feels like a purely abstract exercise. Maybe there’s a strong case that Trump running for president is unconstitutional, but who’s actually going to stop him? +
++The answer, according to Baude and Paulsen, is literally anybody in a legal position to do so. +
++“Section Three’s language is language of automatic legal effect: ‘No person shall be’ directly enacts the officeholding bar it describes where its rule is satisfied,” they explain. “It does not grant a power to Congress (or any other body) to enact or effectuate a rule of disqualification. It enacts the rule itself.” +
++To underscore the point, they compare Section 3’s prohibition to other constitutional restrictions on running for office. Article II, for example, says that “No Person…shall be eligible” for the presidency until they’ve turned 35. If a 20-year-old filed paperwork to run for the presidency, no one would object to state election officials keeping them off the ballot for being too young. +
++More than that: They’d be legally obligated to block the 20 year old. Even if (let’s say) the members of a state board of elections think someone below the drinking age would make the best president in American history, the law is clear that such a person can’t hold office and thus can’t be permitted to run. +
++The “shall be” language of Section 3 is identical to Article II’s, Baude and Paulsen note, and thus entails a similar obligation. Every official involved in the US election system, from a local registrar to members of Congress, has an obligation to determine if candidates for the presidency and other high office are prohibited from running under Section 3. +
++“In principle: Section Three’s disqualification rule may and must be followed — applied, honored, obeyed, enforced, carried out — by anyone whose job it is to figure out whether someone is legally qualified to office,” they write. +
++The fact that’s it easier to tell someone’s age than if they “engaged in” an act of “insurrection” shouldn’t matter. For Baude and Paulsen, the law is the law; if you don’t like it, pass a constitutional amendment to change it. The legal system provides a remedy if a person is wrongly disqualified under the 14th Amendment, just as it does if they are wrongly disqualified on any other grounds. +
++The practical upshot of this analysis, they emphasize, is that officials need to start applying 14th Amendment analysis to candidates now. Trump, and any others found to have previously sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution and then engage in the plot to overturn the 2020 election, can and should be barred from running immediately. +
++“It is not for us to say who all is disqualified by virtue of Section Three’s constitutional rule. That is the duty and responsibility of many officials, administrators, legislators, and judges throughout the country,” Baude and Paulsen conclude. “Where they are called on to decide eligibility to office, they are called on to enforce Section Three, applying the Constitution’s legal standard to the facts before them in a given instance.” +
++The (very strong) practical objection to their argument, and why it matters +
++There is, Baude and Paulsen admit, a “small problem” with their argument: There’s legal precedent to the controversy. +
++In 1869’s In re Griffin (a.k.a. Griffin’s Case), a circuit court judge named Salmon Chase (who would later go on to be the chief justice of the United States) ruled on a criminal appeal by a Black man, Caesar Griffin, convicted of attempted murder. Griffin did not contest the facts of the case, but argued that the judge who presided in the case, Hugh W. Sheffey, was not legally empowered to make a ruling. +
++Before becoming a judge in 1866, Sheffey had served in the Virginia state legislature and then (subsequently) its Confederate equivalent. Griffin argued that Sheffey could not legally hold public office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and therefore his conviction should be vacated. +
++Chase disagreed. In his telling, stripping Sheffey and other former Confederates of their office and nullifying cases like Griffin’s would cause chaos throughout the Reconstruction South — and would be unfair to the former Confederates themselves. Therefore, the 14th Amendment simply can’t be read literally in the way Baude and Paulsen suggest. +
++“Surely a construction which fails to accomplish the main purpose of the amendment, and yet necessarily works the mischief and inconveniences which have been described, and is repugnant to the first principles of justice and right embodied in other provisions of the constitution, is not to be favored, if any other reasonable construction can be found,” Chase held. +
++This, Baude and Paulsen show, is a very bad argument. There is no other “reasonable construction” of Section 3 beyond the literal read, nor does Chase offer one that’s at all possible to square with the plain text of the amendment. Chase’s ruling simply decides that the law cannot possibly be what it looks like it is, because he thinks it’s bad and unfair to Confederates, and thus should be ignored. +
++For this reason, Baude and Paulsen conclude that “Griffin’s Case is a case study in how not to go about the enterprise of faithful constitutional interpretation,” one that should be “hooted down the pages of history [and] purged from our constitutional understanding of Section Three.” +
++This is all well and good as a matter of legal argumentation, but the problem is that Griffin’s Case exists as a matter of fact. Though Griffin was not a Supreme Court case, and thus Chase’s ruling is not binding on higher federal courts in the same manner as a ruling by the justices, Baude and Paulsen themselves admit that “Chase’s tendentious construction of Section Three has gone on to a surprisingly serious career as a precedent.” +
++Moreover, state election officials are not federal judges; the very existence of Griffin’s Case, however poorly reasoned, creates real doubt as to whether they are legally empowered to do what Baude and Paulsen are telling them they have to do. +
++This means that any serious attempt to implement the paper’s findings would give rise to significant legal challenge and political chaos. Imagine — just imagine — that local election administration officials in states like Georgia, Wisconsin, or Arizona acted on Baude and Paulsen’s advice and knocked Trump off the general election ballot. +
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Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images
++Even if these hypothetical officials’ actions were upheld by the Supreme Court, and that’s a very big if, Trump and his supporters would be unlikely to accept the ruling. Instead, they would be likely to see it as more proof that the system is rigged against them — and to act extralegally to install Trump in office. +
++Best case, there’s a write-in campaign to put Trump in the presidency, giving rise to a constitutional crisis if he won (since the Supreme Court would have ruled him ineligible in upholding the state officials’ actions). Worst case — well, the January 6 riot could have been a lot bloodier than it already was. +
++What this illustrates is that the Trump problem is very hard to solve through the law alone. +
++The New York and federal indictments seem to have strengthened his hold on the Republican primary electorate rather than weakened it because a large percentage of the American electorate trusts Trump over neutral arbiters, like nonpartisan election officials and judges. So long as he commands this level of support, the law’s ability to bind Trump will be limited: Even if he’s convicted on federal charges, he could still win the election from his prison cell. +
++Similarly, a serious effort to render Trump ineligible would run up against the practical problem that he is a near-lock to be the candidate of one of the two major parties — which, in a highly polarized system, means he’ll be the candidate of roughly half of the electorate. There is little reason to believe courts enjoy enough legitimacy among Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter) to be in a position to kick a major-party candidate off the ballot. The systemic consequences of such an attempt could well be devastating. +
++This is not a healthy state of affairs. Democracies depend on the rule of law, on the words on the page being respected as the rules of the game. Baude and Paulsen make a very compelling case that those rules render Trump as ineligible as a wide receiver who stepped out of bounds during his route. +
++But in a football game, the players feel obligated to respect the refs. In our fractured political system, it’s not obvious that the refs — be they election administrators or Supreme Court justices — enjoy the same level of legitimacy. We’ve already seen the consequences of this legitimacy deficit during the 2020 election; we could very well see them again in 2024. +
++