Authors and Anthropic have negotiated a proposed class settlement over allegations that Anthropic trained its chatbot on millions of copyrighted books, with terms to be finalized next week. Anthropic declined comment; lawyer Justin Nelson called the settlement historic and said it will benefit class members. U.S. District Judge William Alsup earlier ruled that the AI's distilling from thousands of written works qualified as fair use because it was quintessentially transformative. The company nonetheless faced trial over acquiring books from online 'shadow libraries' of pirated copies. Three writers alleged the practices amounted to large-scale theft and accused the company of strip-mining human expression and ingenuity.
Both sides of the case have "negotiated a proposed class settlement," according to a federal appeals court filing Tuesday that said the terms will be finalized next week.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco said in his June ruling that the AI system's distilling from thousands of written works to be able to produce its own passages of text qualified as "fair use" under U.S. copyright law because it was "quintessentially transformative."
A trio of writers - Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson - alleged in their lawsuit last year that Anthropic's practices amounted to "large-scale theft," and that the San Francisco-based company "seeks to profit from strip-mining the human expression and ingenuity behind each one of those works."
Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic's (AI large language models) trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them - but to turn a hard corner and create something different,
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