The question sounds pretty sensational but the allegation may go down as one of the biggest legal challenges of the century. The New York Times this past week sued Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI for copyright infringement. The paper claims that AI tools vacuum up text from everywhere and everything and these devices do so without permission, and without compensation.

Earlier this year I participated in what has now become an annual event, “Local Author Night,” put on by the Highland County Public Library. It’s a remarkable event with a surprisingly large number of local writers who display their books, talk to attendees and then participate in a Q&A about the trials and tribulations of writing, including advice to those who are thinking about getting into a literary vocation or profession.

Opening statements by attending authors moved eventually to me sitting at the end of a long table. I tried to think of something that hadn’t already been said, something still relevant to the nature of the discussion. What was on my mind were developing news stories about ChatGPT and how it could affect the world, everything from automated high school and college essays to automated but unverified news stories, or the future of fiction and non-fiction writing. Imagine a publishing house in the future paying a pittance to a ChatGPT application to write a summer romance novel about affluent families in the Hamptons but borrowing descriptions and even verbatim sentences from “The Great Gatsby.”

A particularly trenchant sentence or paragraph from a John le Carré spy novel would fit nicely into a ChatGPT spy thriller. An especially interesting description from Martyn Rady’s history of central Europe (“The Middle Kingdoms”) might be swept up into a page-turning medieval tale about Sir Lancelot and the Roundtable. An AI news generator developing a story about semiconductor competition could steal research from Chris Miller’s best seller “Chip War.” In fact, ChatGPT probably already has vacuumed up Chip War, le Carré’s novels, and Carl Sandburg’s biopic series on Abraham Lincoln.

So, what effect is AI having on copyright issues, and what’s happening to longstanding ethics related to plagiarism? This is precisely what’s at stake in the New York Times lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI.

There’s an age-old rule in journalism that when writing about a news event, you needn’t be concerned about copyright when reporting facts. If the New York Times prints a picture of a particular school that has been bombed in Kyiv, Ukraine and CNN reports, based on that picture, that the school was bombed, that’s OK. If CNN copies part or all of the New York Times story about the school, that’s not OK without permissions which may involve compensation.

The problem AI presents is that when it vacuums up information it doesn’t distinguish between evidence-based facts, alternative facts, and intellectual property. In fact, AI doesn’t care as it vacuums text, and cares even less if the AI algorithms are in the wrong hands. In this international age of good and bad actors, incentivized by money, politics and propaganda, the absence of rules and consequences will lead to information chaos.

Separate from the concerns that writers like me might have, it’s frightening to imagine the consequences of untethered AI when it comes to news stories of events happening around the world. Propagandists in Russia, China and Iran, just to name some of the principal propagandists, are already creating their own intentional versions of events. Put these fictional versions of events into pseudo news entities like Russia’s Pravda, the China Daily or even news aggregators in the U.S. and these false news narratives become “factual” to those who too casually believe that anything they read must be true. All this means that there are issues that run well beyond just copyright.

Much to the dismay of popular music artists, AI is generating songs that mimic their unique style and lyrics. International banks are troubled when autocracies like Putin’s Russia fake their GDP data as financial news for today’s dodgy news websites. To put a waggish spin on it, the Wall Street Journal’s “Pepper and Salt” cartoon put it succinctly this way, “Artificial Intelligence, meet alternative facts.”

NewsGuard, is an organization founded in 2018 by former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz and journalist Steven Brill, was purposefully designed to counter misinformation and hoax news sites. It reports that it has identified 614 “unreliable AI-generated news websites (and counting) … with little to no human oversight… is tracking false narratives produced by artificial intelligence tools spanning 15 languages… (and) typically having generic names such as iBusiness Day, Ireland Top News and Daily Time.”

With so much attention given nowadays to our phones and social media apps, the worry is that casual and indifferent consumers are absorbing information that has been vacuumed up from indiscreet providers, if not overt propagandists. That means that many information consumers have become unwitting stooges, ingesting misinformation about national and international events, health care, climate change, financial facts, and other important issues, and passing that information on as their perception of reality.

In a somewhat related forewarning, journalist Peggy Noonan of the WSJ recently wrote in her look-back column on 2023, “We are allowing this world-changer and life-changer (meaning AI) by people who, we know from a quarter century of exposés, investigations and leaks, are loyal to their inventions but not to human beings, and certainly not to America. Their claimed idealism — We’re trying to advance mankind! — isn’t their true agenda, which is power and wealth and a place to hide when the world they’re inventing explodes.”

So, will unregulated artificial intelligence ultimately steal not only our intellectual property, but our historical sense of “truths to be self-evident,” and ultimately be destructive of the social bonds that unite us as a nation? It’s a worthwhile thought as we venture into the year 2024.

Bill Sims is a Hillsboro resident, retired president of the Denver Council on Foreign Relations, an author and runs a small farm in Berrysville with his wife. He is a former educator, executive and foundation president.