Jim Ottaviani

A round of recent executive orders manages to add insult to real injuries by proposing name changes that disrespect…everything.

The insult brought to mind the following from a lovely (and freely available; click on the title) book about Glacier National Park that I read not long after visiting. Because names matter, I’ve used the modern and factually correct ‘Native American’ in place of the old word Roberts used — I think she’d approve:

“Why is it that, with the most poetic nomenclature in the world — the Native American — one by one the historic names of peaks, lakes, and rivers of Glacier Park are being replaced by the names of obscure Government officials, professors in small universities, unimportant people who go out there to the West and memorialize themselves on Government maps? Each year sees some new absurdity. What names in the world are more beautiful than Going-to-the-Sun and Rising-Wolf? Here are Almost-a-Dog Mountain, Two-Medicine Lake, Red Eagle — a few that have survived.

“Every peak, every butte, every river and lake of this country has been named by the Native Americans. … What has happened? Look over the map of Glacier Park. The Native American names have been done away with. Majestic peaks, towering buttes are being given names like this: Haystack Butte, Trapper Peak, Huckleberry Mountain, the Guard House, the Garden Wall. One of the most wonderful things in the Rocky Mountains is this Garden Wall. I wish I knew what the Native Americans called it. Then there are Iceberg Lake, Florence Falls, Twin Lakes, Gunsight Mountain, Split Mountain, Surprise Pass, Peril Peak — that last was a dandy! Alliterative! — Church Butte, Statuary Mountain, Buttercup Park. Can you imagine the inspiration of the man who found some flowery meadow between granite crags and took away from it its Native American name and called it Buttercup Park?

“The Blackfeet are the aristocrats among Native Americans. They were the buffalo hunters, and this great region was once theirs. To the mountains and lakes of what is now Glacier Park, they attached their legends, which are their literature.

“The white man came, and not content with eliminating the Native Americans, he went further and wiped out their history. … Is there no way to stop this vandalism? There must be seven Goat Mountains. Here and there is a peak, like Reynolds Peak or Grinnell Mountain, and some others, properly named for men intimately associated with the region. But Reynolds’s Native American name was Death-on-the-Trail. When you have seen the mountain you can well believe that Death-on-the-Trail would fit it well.

“There is hardly a name in the telephone directory that is not fastened to some wonderful peak in this garden spot of ours. … Here, then, the Government has done a splendid thing and done it none too well. It has preserved for the people of the United States and for all the world a scenic spot so beautiful and so impressive that I have not even attempted to describe it. It is not possible. But it…has allowed its geographers to take away the original Native American names of this home of the Blackfeet and so destroy the last trace of a vanishing race.”

from Through Glacier Park: Seeing America First with Howard Eaton by Mary Roberts Rinehart (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1916), pp. 66-71

This June, as I headed out of A2CAF, where I bought a bunch of comics, connected with some artists and writers I admired, and as always had a good time, Eli Neiburger snagged me and asked if I’d be interested in helping the Ann Arbor District Library celebrate Ann Arbor’s 200th birthday. The answer, of course, was “of course.”

I love my adopted home town…I’ve now lived here far longer than any other single place I’ve received mail, voted, run the streets, etc., so when people ask me where I’m from I hedge a little (California, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, and even New York can all make legit claims) but land on Michigan.

Anyway, my follow-up question was “how?”, and that’s when Eli asked me if I’d like to write a play about a meeting between Enrico Fermi and Werner Heisenberg that happened here in Ann Arbor in 1939. I had a vague notion of that story, and not even the slightest notion of whether I could do this.

But with unearned confidence, I said “of course” again, and here we are, with a kind of prequel to the first comics story I ever wrote: 1997’s “Heavy Water,” illustrated by Steve Lieber, which appeared in Two-Fisted Science. That was about Heisenberg and Niels Bohr’s meeting — which happened in Nazi-occupied Denmark shortly before Bohr escaped to the U.S. — well after Fermi failed to convince Heisenberg to not return to Germany, and not work on the bomb there. Like the subjects of this play, we’ll never know for sure what they said to each other, but that didn’t stop me from imagining their conversations. An interesting coincidence, by way of bring things full circle, is that Michael Frayn saw the dramatic potential in this story as well, and his excellent Copenhagen won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2000.

And now I’ve written a play too. It’s short, and any confidence I have in writing another, much less longer one, is still unearned. But it’s been a great experience, thanks to the Library and the Ann Arbor Civic Theater!

Today I submitted a comment to the U.S. Copyright Office’s public comment system on AI and copyright. There are a lot of problems with copyright law. It lasts too long (my work shouldn’t be protected for 70 years after my death!) and is tilted towards corporate consolidation of power (hello, Disney).

But it currently doesn’t recognize machines as creators. That’s good. It should stay that way.

So, head on over to

https://www.copyright.gov/policy/artificial-intelligence/comment-submission/

and add your voice to what I hope is a strong chorus of support for keeping copyright human.

FYI, here’s what I said:

Please continue to uphold and strengthen the current policy on artificial intelligence (AI) technology as described in “Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated
by Artificial Intelligence”; https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf).

One possible route to do so is by adding language to the law and “Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices” (https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/) to explicitly state that material generated by AI technology is not copyrightable.

In the Compendium, Section 313.2 could include something along the lines of

“A work generated by a machine or software, based on a prompt or request made by a human, regardless of whether the prompt or request itself might be deemed copyrightable, unique, or creative.”

as an example of something that lacks human authorship, and therefore is not protected by copyright.

Making sure that “Authors and Inventors”, as they’re described in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, are human will not only protect those in the creative arts, but those in technical fields as well. People who create new and useful AI technology should receive copyright protection, but the product of those AI technologies should not.

Thank you.