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Around half a million writers will be eligible for a payday of at least $3,000, thanks to a historic $1.5 billion settlement in a class action lawsuit that a group of authors brought against Anthropic<\/a>.<\/p>\n This landmark settlement marks the largest payout<\/a> in the history of U.S. copyright law, but this isn\u2019t a victory for authors \u2014 it\u2019s yet another win for tech companies.<\/p>\n Tech giants are racing to amass as much written material as possible to train their LLMs, which power groundbreaking AI chat products like ChatGPT and Claude \u2014 the same products that are endangering the creative industries, even if their outputs are milquetoast<\/a>. These AIs can become more sophisticated when they ingest more data, but after scraping basically the entire internet, these companies are literally running out<\/a> of new information.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why Anthropic, the company behind Claude, pirated millions of books from \u201cshadow libraries<\/a>\u201d and fed them into its AI. This particular lawsuit, Bartz v. Anthropic<\/a>, is one of dozens filed against companies like Meta, Google, OpenAI, and Midjourney<\/a> over the legality of training AI on copyrighted works.<\/p>\n But writers aren\u2019t getting this settlement because their work was fed to an AI \u2014 this is just a costly slap on the wrist for Anthropic, a company that just raised another $13 billion<\/a>, because it illegally downloaded books instead of buying them.<\/p>\n In June, federal judge William Alsup sided with Anthropic<\/a> and ruled that it is, indeed, legal to train AI on copyrighted material. The judge argues that this use case is \u201ctransformative\u201d enough to be protected by the fair use doctrine, a carve-out of copyright law that\u00a0hasn\u2019t been updated<\/a>\u00a0since 1976.<\/p>\n \u201cLike any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic\u2019s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them \u2014 but to turn a hard corner and create something different,\u201d the judge said.<\/p>\n It was the piracy \u2014 not the AI training \u2014 that moved Judge Alsup to bring the case to trial, but with Anthropic\u2019s settlement, a trial is no longer necessary.<\/p>\n \u201cToday\u2019s settlement, if approved, will resolve the plaintiffs\u2019 remaining legacy claims,\u201d said Aparna Sridhar, deputy general counsel at Anthropic, in a statement. \u201cWe remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems.\u201d<\/p>\n As dozens more cases over the relationship between AI and copyrighted works go to court, judges now have Bartz v. Anthropic to reference as a precedent. But given the ramifications of these decisions, maybe another judge will arrive at a different conclusion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n