A short scene, one that kinda sums up my legal experience suing a generative AI company: a long-titled short essay
Article excerpt
Paul Tremblay discusses a moment in the court room that summed up his experience suing a generative AI company.
Paul Tremblay is the author of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, out now from William Morrow. Below, he discusses a moment in the court room that summed up his experience suing a generative AI company. (Photo credit: Tim Llewellyn)
In the spring of year redacted, I found myself on the coast opposite the one on which I live, cloistered within a glass-entombed meeting room, and having to spend seven legal hours answering questions posed to me by a lawyer representing a giant corporation. Not my idea of fun.
The deposition would turn out to be the penultimate event of my almost two years as a plaintiff in a class action lawsuit, suing a generative AI company on behalf of writers who have had their works scraped and fed into a large language model without having granted permission and without remuneration.
The ultimate event was reading through a transcript of the lawyer’s questions and my answers and discovering to my horror that I speak with the verbal repetitive tics of Foghorn Leghorn combined with the fuzzed-out tempo of the Dude from The Big Lebowski, all of it garnished with a slew of likes and ums.
Anyway, somewhere within those seven hours that I’ll never get back, a lawyer introduced my name of novel redacted as evidence. He did so somewhat sheepishly. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, he perhaps experienced an existential moment of clarity, if not empathy, a moment of what-are-we-doing-here?. Instead of placing published and purchased copies of my novel onto the shared tabletop, he dropped three weighty slabs of printed-out PDFs.
I later learned that the printed PDFs were (mostly) necessary so that the pages could be easier stamped with legal document identifying marks called Bates numbers. But let’s not allow legal minutiae to get in the away of symbol and righteous anger.
My in-the-moment reaction to the printed-out PDFs thudding onto the table and legal record: Jesus Christ, those creatively nouned profanity redacted couldn’t be bothered to buy a copy of my book, even now! EVEN NOW!!!