So I went over the list of 500,000 books eligible for the Anthropic lawsuit settlement and lo and behold and there it was: Death Need Not Be Fatal, the book I wrote with Malachy McCourt. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion, which works out to about $3,000 per author. Or in our case, a three grand split.
Whoopee, right? Writers win round one against the robots!
Not really. The judge actually ruled in Anthropic’s favor, saying it was “fair use” for the Gen AI giant to take as much copyrighted material as they wanted because it was being used for training their large language model.
Wait, what?
He only ruled against AI for using books from pirate sites that make them available online without paying authors.
This wasn’t a win for writers at all. Gen AI can still use copyrighted books at will with no compensation to authors, then disperse them in diluted forms to millions of Claude users.
Imagine stealing a gold brick, melting it down into a vat of 500,000 other stolen gold bricks, then selling it piecemeal in ingots. Each ingot holds only a sliver of the individual stolen bricks, so there are no fingerprints back to the owner. All Gen AI is doing is laundering stolen gold.
Leave a Reply