Back in June, a judge ruled that Anthropic
could use books to train its AI without the permission of the authors who wrote said works. But the case
wasn't quite settled. There was still the matter of how Anthropic got the books that it used. Apparently,
they were pirated copies downloaded for free.
It seems that the "fair use" principle on which Anthropic's lawyers were hanging their hats on wasn't
going to hold up. Since the books were essentially stolen from the authors, there was nothing fair
about how they were acquired. To avoid a ruling against them later this year (and possibly being
forced to pay even more), Anthropic
settled last week for $1.5 billion.
While I think that it's great that the authors and the Authors Guild won, I think that $1.5 billion
is a paltry sum when taken as a whole for the entire industry past, present, and future.
That last part is what bothers me. As corporations choose AI over people (and I'm not just talking about
creatives but software programmers, data analysts, and other technical professions), more and more of us
will find ourselves displaced. We'll have to hope that consumers prefer works written by humans over
computers.
There are still a couple of cases out there that might be influenced by this one.
Newspapers are suing OpenAI and
Warner Bros. is going after Midjourney for snagging Tweety, Superman, and many
other copyrighted characters. Maybe corporate lawyers will be a bit more successful than those
of the Authors Guild.
\_/
DED
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