Billion dollars Is it not – but it still concentrates the mind. At least it’s for me when I heard that AI Antropic agreed at least $ 1.5 billion in settlement For authors and publishers whose books were used to train the early version of their huge language model, Claude. It happened after the judge issued a summary sentence that he pirated the books he used. The proposed contract – which is still being examined by a cautious judge – apparently admits the authors of at least USD 3000 per book. I wrote eight and my wife reached five. We are talking about dollars in the bathroom!
Because the settlement is based on pirate books, it does not really apply to a huge problem whether AI can train their models in the field of copyright protected by copyright. But significant that real money is involved. Earlier, the AI AII argument was based on legal, moral and even political hypothetics. Now, when the situation becomes true, it’s time to solve the basic issue: since the elite artificial intelligence depends on the content of the book, is it fair to build a trillion dollar companies without paying authors?
Apart from the legality, I fought this problem. But now, when we go from court to check books, the film fell from my eyes. I deserve these dollars! Paying authors seem to be the right thing to do. Despite the powerful forces (including US President Donald Trump) arguing differently.
Compact printout statement
Before I go further, let me drop the waiver of responsibility. As I mentioned, I am the author myself and I stood to gain or lose this argument. I am also a member of the author of the author’s Guild, who is a forceful supporter of the authors and suits OpenAI and Microsoft for including the work of authors in their training. (Because I embrace technology companies, I refrain from voices about disputes with these companies.) Of course, I speak for myself today.
In the past, I was a secret from the council, really torn apart in terms of whether companies have the right to train their models on purchased books. The argument that humanity is building a huge compendium of human knowledge really resonates with me. When I interviewed the Gimes artist in 2023, she expressed enthusiasm before being a collaborator of this experiment: “Oh, sick, I can live forever!” She said. It was also energetic with me. The commonly disseminating my consciousness is an vital reason why I love what I do.
But embedding the book inside a huge language model built by a giant corporation is something else. It should be remembered that books are probably the most valuable body that the AI model can consume. Their length and consistency are unique tutors of human thought. Entities that cover are huge and comprehensive. They are much more reliable than social media and provide deeper understanding than press articles. I would risk saying that without books huge language models would be extremely weaker.
It can therefore be argued that Opeli, Google, Meta, Anthropic and the rest should pay for access to books. At the end of last month, during the shameful technological dinner of the White House, general directors change the crazy sums, which allegedly invested in American data centers to meet the requirements of AI calculations. Apple promised $ 600 billion, and Meta said that it would match this amount. Opeli is part of a joint venture worth $ 500 billion called Stargate. Compared to these numbers, $ 1.5 billion, which anthropic, as part of the settlement, agreed to distribute authors and publishers as part of the violation case, does not sound so impressive.
Unfair apply
Nevertheless, it may be that the law is on the side of these companies. Copyright allows something that is called “allowed use”, which allows uncontrolled apply of books and articles based on several criteria, one of which is whether the apply is “transformational” – which means that it is based on the content of the book in an novel way, which does not compete with the original product. The judge responsible for the anthropic violation case said that the application of legally obtained books during training is actually protected by allowed apply. Determining that this is an awkward exercise, because we are dealing with legal taxes drawn before the Internet – ourselves AI.
Of course, there must be a solution based on state-of-the-art circumstances. The AI action plan in the White House announced that he may not offer it. But in his comments about the plan, Trump considered this problem. In his opinion, do not pay authors – because it is too tough to set up a system that would pay them honestly. “You can’t expect you to have a successful AI program when every article, book or anything else you read or studied, you should pay,” said Trump. “We appreciate it, but we just can’t do it – because it is not feasible.” (The source of administration told me this week that the statement “gives tone” of official politics).