{"id":12057,"date":"2025-09-12T16:17:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T16:17:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/12057\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T16:17:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T16:17:11","slug":"i-wasnt-sure-i-wanted-anthropic-to-pay-me-for-my-books-i-do-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/12057\/","title":{"rendered":"I Wasn\u2019t Sure I Wanted Anthropic to Pay Me for My Books\u2014I Do Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

A billion dollars isn\u2019t what it used to be\u2014but it still focuses the mind. At least it did for me when I heard that the AI company Anthropic agreed to an at least $1.5 billion settlement<\/a> for authors and publishers whose books were used to train an early version of its large language model, Claude. This came after a judge issued a summary judgement that it had pirated the books it used. The proposed agreement\u2014which is still under scrutiny by the wary judge\u2014would reportedly grant authors a minimum $3,000 per book. I\u2019ve written eight and my wife has notched five. We are talking bathroom-renovation dollars here!<\/p>\n

Since the settlement is based on pirated books, it doesn\u2019t really address the big issue of whether it\u2019s OK for AI companies to train their models on copyrighted works. But it\u2019s significant that real money is involved. Previously the argument over AI copyright was based on legal, moral, and even political hypotheticals. Now that things are getting real, it\u2019s time to tackle the fundamental issue: Since elite AI depends on book content, is it fair for companies to build trillion-dollar businesses without paying authors?<\/p>\n

Legalities aside, I have been struggling with the issue. But now that we\u2019re moving from the courthouse to the checkbook, the film has fallen from my eyes. I deserve those dollars! Paying authors feels like the right thing to do. Despite the powerful forces (including US president Donald Trump) arguing otherwise.<\/p>\n

Fine-Print Disclaimer<\/p>\n

Before I go farther, let me drop a whopper of a disclaimer. As I mentioned, I\u2019m an author myself, and stand to gain or lose from the outcome of this argument. I\u2019m also on the council of the Author\u2019s Guild, which is a strong advocate for authors and is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for including authors\u2019 works in their training runs. (Because I cover tech companies, I abstain on votes involving litigation with those firms.) Obviously, I\u2019m speaking for myself today.<\/p>\n

In the past, I\u2019ve been a secret outlier on the council, genuinely torn on the issue of whether companies have the right to train their models on legally purchased books. The argument that humanity is building a vast compendium of human knowledge genuinely resonates with me. When I interviewed the artist Grimes<\/a> in 2023, she expressed enthusiasm over being a contributor to this experiment: \u201cOh, sick, I might get to live forever!\u201d she said. That vibed with me, too. Spreading my consciousness widely is a big reason I love what I do.<\/p>\n

But embedding a book inside a large language model built by a giant corporation is something different. Keep in mind that books are arguably the most valuable corpus that an AI model can ingest. Their length and coherency are unique tutors of human thought. The subjects they cover are vast and comprehensive. They are much more reliable than social media and provide a deeper understanding than news articles. I would venture to say that without books, large language models would be immeasurably weaker.<\/p>\n

So one might argue that OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic and the rest should pay handsomely for access to books. Late last month, at that shameful White House tech dinner<\/a>, CEOs took turns impressing Donald Trump with the insane sums they were allegedly investing in US-based data centers to meet AI\u2019s computation demands. Apple promised $600 billion, and Meta said it would match that amount. OpenAI is part of a $500 billion joint venture called Stargate. Compared to those numbers, that $1.5 billion that Anthropic, as part of the settlement, agreed to distribute to authors and publishers as part of the infringement case doesn\u2019t sound so impressive.<\/p>\n

Unfair Use<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, it could well be that the law is on the side of those companies. Copyright law allows for something called \u201cfair use,\u201d which permits the uncompensated exploitation of books and articles based on several criteria, one of which is whether the use is \u201ctransformational\u201d\u2014meaning that it builds on the book\u2019s content in an innovative manner that doesn\u2019t compete with the original product. The judge in charge of the Anthropic infringement case has ruled<\/a> that using legally obtained books in training is indeed protected by fair use. Determining this is an awkward exercise, since we are dealing with legal yardsticks drawn before the internet\u2014let alone AI.<\/p>\n

Obviously, there needs to be a solution based on contemporary circumstances. The White House\u2019s AI Action Plan announced this May didn\u2019t offer one. But in his remarks about the plan, Trump weighed in on the issue.<\/a> In his view, authors shouldn\u2019t be paid\u2014because it\u2019s too hard to set up a system that would pay them fairly. \u201cYou can\u2019t be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book, or anything else that you\u2019ve read or studied, you\u2019re supposed to pay for,\u201d Trump said. \u201cWe appreciate that, but just can’t do it\u2014because it’s not doable.\u201d (An administration source told me this week that the statement \u201csets the tone\u201d for official policy.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A billion dollars isn\u2019t what it used to be\u2014but it still focuses the mind. At least it did…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12058,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[6592,1463,343,12770,412,146,85,46,8457],"class_list":{"0":"post-12057","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-algorithms","9":"tag-anthropic","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-backchannel-nl","12":"tag-books","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-il","15":"tag-israel","16":"tag-law"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}