Hand pictures and paper background from Unsplash. Photo of Davis from UNC Libraries. | Graphic by Jane Durden
Story by Sofía Basurto
Graphic by Jane Durden
[Audio: Classroom noise]
Sofía Basurto
Naji Husseini is a Teaching Associate Professor in the joint biomedical engineering department at UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State. When Chat GPT came out in 2022, he had some thoughts about its effect on his classroom.
Naji Husseini
“Suddenly my concern was that it could be used to to avoid learning and just to get answers on any type of assessment that’s not done in the class.”
Sofía Basurto
This is a pretty common concern regarding how AI models like Chat GPT would affect academic institutions. But concerns about copyright and Ai, are just as prevalent on these campuses.
[Audio: CNBC Breaking News]
Sofía Basurto
In December of 2023, news broke about the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI. The basis of these concerns was that OpenAI is feeding their Chat GPT algorithms New York Times articles for training data. Meaning that Chat GPT uses information from the newspaper to answer users questions, acting as a competitor to the newspaper with its own articles.
These big concerns are the same for academic publishing companies.
Anne Gilliland
“Those publishers want us to do to prevent, the use of that journal content in large language models and for AI purposes, either as, for training models or as prompts”
Sofía Basurto
This is Anne Gilliland, a Scholarly Communications Officer at UNC Library. Within the libraries she works on all kinds of things, but lately she’s had a focus on the contract negotiations between UNC libraries and academic publishing companies.
Two major publishers that UNC renews yearly with, have sent over amendments to their contracts. They want UNC libraries to ensure user’s follow strict restrictions when it comes to Ai.
Anne Gilliland
“We can’t somehow keep every student from ever, typing in some text from a journal article in order to they hope to get a better idea of what, of an explainer of what they article meant.”
Sofía Basurto
The terms of these new contracts wouldn’t affect only students, but researchers as well.
Dave Hansen
“The vast majority of, scholarly and creative content and data that academic researchers have access to is, only available electronically through licenses.”
Sofía Basurto
This is Dave Hansen, the Executive Director of Authors Alliance, a nonprofit that supports authors who want to share their works widely with the world to benefit the public. He previously worked at Duke University, at scholarly communications services.
Dave Hansen
“For some of the big publishers, it can be, 1 or $2 million check every year just to gain access. And so when you’re shelling out that much money, you want it to actually meet the needs of your researchers.”
[Audio: Keyboard typing]
Sofía Basurto
Researchers who use data mining, or analyze large batches of raw data to find patterns, find AI to be very helpful. That’s just one example of what university libraries are trying to get publishers to consider in their contracts.
Hansen explains that the whole point of our copyright system in the US is to promote the progress of science. It’s not supposed to be just a private benefit for authors.
Dave Hansen
“But publishers, because they’re concerned about commercial AI applications, are now putting in license clauses that say, well, we don’t care what copyright says.”
Sofía Basurto
UNC library’s contracts are very important. But they can’t agree to contract terms that will bind them to ways they can’t sustain.
Gilliland says new technologies cause all sorts of adjustments.
[Audio: Piano player]
Anne Gilliland
“There was a time when the player piano generated a lot of heartburn, amongst rights holders and piano player piano makers, and that we had these roles so that could only be read by the machine. And is this, copyrightable thing. And it’s sometimes it’s just seems like we go through the same thing with every new technology.”
Sofía Basurto
I’m Sofía Basurto.
