Anthropic Settlement
Judge Ruled On Monday…
This is what is called the Final Settlement. There is still a ways to go before checks start hitting the mails, but this is a huge step closer.
For those of you who do not know what I am talking about, Anthropic must pay 1.5 Billion to authors who they stole work from to train their AI. It is not a bad settlement, especially for those of us who have been prolific and had copyrights registered. We shall see.
Again, a ways before payments go out, but at least this is in the payments stage now. You can find press releases about it or go on the Author’s Guild site and read their take on this final settlement ruling.
There are more lawsuits still in process than I can follow for copyright theft and Kris and I are parties in a bunch of them. Each has its own issues, but having Anthropic settle like this is good for authors.
And for those of you who use AI to help in your own writing or with art, please stop. You are using stolen copyright, which makes you the same level of thief as the person who originally stole it. And stunningly lazy.
AI will find its place going into the future, but at the moment AI for writing and for art is just plain theft. Just stop.
One Comment
LM
My dayjob is QA. My fave senior dev wanted to build ‘machine learning’ into some of our unfun thorny software bits before they ever coopted a SF trope term to market general purpose generative LLM.
People don’t get it. LLM already has specific use cases that predate the craze that it’s excellent at, e.g. logging tons of ancient tablets no one has time to translate. It’s just automation, stronger.
When I worked in dental insurance, we had completely not at all LLM or machine learning in any way automation. ‘AI’ is just to make automation better and more powerful.
If your use case is automation, this is the tool for it. If your use case is literally anything else, including research, you are using the wrong tool if you turn to even the most ethically built and sourced AI.