Why an NLAPW Policy on AI Matters
By Nancy Dafoe, NLAPW President
With the wonders of artificial intelligence (AI) constantly in the news, I thought long and hard about why there are few, if any, regulations on this technology. What brought us to these potential ethical and professional dilemmas regarding AI?
The tech industry has been racing at breakneck speed without restrictions for some time now, and the inevitability of scary issues stopped no one in charge because the only criteria was how quickly the technology could be developed.
Perhaps the most important consideration to keep in mind when discussing the use of AI systems is that they are almost completely unregulated. By the time any real and reasonable government and tech industry oversight and regulation arrives, it may be too late. This is not fatalism but an open-eyed look at what is happening and an examination of why it is occurring. We are in trouble if the only substantial questions being addressed in the tech industry and by government officials are, “How far can we go?” and “How fast can we get there?” Even industry insiders recognize this problem, yet seem unable to stop, back up, or thoughtfully consider consequences.
Let me jump into the middle with a fairly recent court case: “A federal judge in San Francisco ruled … that Anthropic’s use of books without permission to train its artificial intelligence system was legal under U.S. copyright law,” according to Reuters reporter Blake Britton. What this means, quite simply, is that copyrighted books hold no copyright privilege under AI. Anything goes.
The Harvard Business Review’s April 7, 2023, issue held a window up to the debate with an article by Gil Appel, Juliana Neelbauer, and David A. Schweidel, titled “Generative AI Has an Intellectual Property Problem”: “Generative AI can seem like magic. Image generators such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, or DALL·E 2 can produce remarkable visuals in styles from aged photographs and water colors to pencil drawings and Pointillism. The resulting products can be fascinating — both quality and speed of creation are elevated compared to average human performance.”
The issues surrounding AI in the making of original art in any medium are just as complicated and ethically problematic with writing, as noted in the same article: “The capabilities of text generators are perhaps even more striking, as they [AI systems] write essays, poems, and summaries, and are proving adept mimics of style and form (though they can take creative license with facts).”
Political cartoonist and essayist Jason Chatfield wrote about reviewing a new documentary on AI with some startling quotations woven into his notations in an April 6, 2026, blog post, “Apocaloptimism & Why We Should Probably Stop Letting Billionaires Grade Their Own Homework:” “The speed at which AI is developing is not just some far-off concern for labs and tech bros in hoodies; it is already reshaping how creative work is made, shared, and valued. Artists are seeing their works scraped into training sets without consent, new images generated in their style overnight, and clients — who used to hire illustrators or cartoonists — now asking AI for ‘something similar’ at a fraction of the price. Our rights, our income, and even the very definition of what it means to be an artist are suddenly up for grabs.”
Not an alarmist by nature, I was stopped cold at this sentence from Chatfield’s blog post: “There is currently more regulation on selling a sandwich to the public than there is on building potentially a world-ending AGI [artificial general intelligence].” That statement should make everyone stop and think.
Is AI useful in the business world? Undoubtedly. Should we continue calling the theft of intellectual property merely a tool? Not so much. Is using AI to write a book or just “a few chapters” really a work of the person named on the cover?
As of this writing, there are nearly 30 court lawsuits related to the theft of intellectual property by OpenAI and ChatGPT, two leading generative AI companies. The money involved in these cases is astronomical, and too often, money has driven results in both the courts and our legislative bodies. Will the courts find in favor of those bringing the lawsuits, or find for big money? Businesses like IBM and technology industry insiders have actually warned of the dangers of AI, reminding users that AI is programmed by human beings, incorporating our all-toohuman biases into systems. Yet AI lacks human restraints arising out of ethical or moral concerns. AI has been used by “bad actors” to create cyberattacks worldwide and deliberately used to spread misinformation on a massive scale.
As Pen Women, we need to use the most appropriate tools in the act of creating, and we need to be willing to revise our methodologies and thinking as new ideas about “tools” arise. Yet, we should also be certain those tools are actually tools for us and not replacing the human being. We need to be creative women who hold the ethical and moral courage to decide when and where certain “tools” should or should not be used. We define ourselves as professional writers, artists, and composers in the NLAPW. As generative AI is not simply “a tool” but has become replacement for creative human input, we need to recognize exactly what that means for all of us.
We should not be afraid of tackling the AI issue but meet it head on, changing the environments in which we support one another in our creative endeavors. Creating an AI policy that the tech industry and government officials are seemingly afraid to write is the least we can do.