"Since the settlement is based on pirated books, it doesn't really address the big issue of whether it's OK for AI companies to train their models on copyrighted works. But it's significant that real money is involved. Previously the argument over AI copyright was based on legal, moral, and even political hypotheticals. Now that things are getting real, it's time to tackle the fundamental issue: Since elite AI depends on book content, is it fair for companies to build trillion-dollar businesses without paying authors?"
"Fine-Print Disclaimer Before I go farther, let me drop a whopper of a disclaimer. As I mentioned, I'm an author myself, and stand to gain or lose from the outcome of this argument. I'm also on the council of the Author's Guild, which is a strong advocate for authors and is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for including authors' works in their training runs. (Because I cover tech companies, I abstain on votes involving litigation with those firms.) Obviously, I'm speaking for myself today."
Anthropic agreed to an at least $1.5 billion settlement for book creators and publishers whose books were used to train an early version of its large language model, Claude, following a judge's summary judgment that the books had been pirated. The proposed agreement would reportedly grant a minimum $3,000 per book, while not resolving whether training on copyrighted works is lawful. Real monetary stakes have shifted the debate from hypotheticals to questions of fairness about trillion-dollar AI firms building products on book content without compensating creators. A disclosed council member of a writers' guild noted a personal financial interest and abstains on related votes.
Read at WIRED
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