Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data.
Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine.
Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
But nobody was ever going to that, not when there are billions in VC dollars at stake for whoever moves fastest. Everybody will simply risk the fine, which tends to not be anywhere close to enough to have a deterrent effect in the future.
That is like saying Uber would have not had any problems if they just entered into a licensing contract with taxi medallion holders. It was faster to just put unlicensed taxis on the streets and use investor money to pay fines and lobby for favorable legislation. In the same way, it was faster for Anthropic to load up their models with un-DRM'd PDFs and ePUBs from wherever instead of licensing them publisher by publisher.
And thank god they did. There was no perfectly legal channel to fix the taxi cartel. Now you don't even have to use Uber in many of these places because taxis had to compete - they otherwise never would have stopped pulling the "credit card reader is broken" scam, taking long routes on purpose, and started using tech that made them more accountable to these things as well as harder for them to racially profile passengers. (They would infamously pretend not to see you if they didn't want to give you service back when you had to hail them with an IRL gesture instead of an app..)
Didn't Google have a long standing project to do just that?
If this is a choice between risking to pay 1.5 billion or just paying 15 mil safely, they might.
Uber could have made the same decision and worked with regulators to be allowed into markets one at a time. It was an intentional choice to lean on the fact that Uber drivers blended into traffic and could hide in plain sight until Uber had enough market share and customer base to give them leverage.
Anthropic did. That was the part of their operation that they didn't get in trouble for, but the news spun it as "Anthropic destroyed millions of books to make AI".
it wont be a chatgpt or coding model ofc, thats not what they go for, but it'll be interesting to see its quality as its all fairly and honestly done. transparently.
Otherwise, of course they would tell them to just pound sand.
Agreed. Great book for those looking for a read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102439.Rainbows_End
The author, Vernor Vinge, is also responsible for popularizing the term 'singularity'.
“Marooned in Real Time” remains my fav.
I could read a book, but its highly unlikely I could regurgitate it, much less months or years later. An LLM, however, can. While we can say "training is like reading", its also not like reading at all due to permanent perfect recall.
Not only does an LLM have perfect recall, it also has the ability to distribute plagiarized ideas at a scale no human can. There's a lot of questions to be answered about where fair use starts/ends for these LLM products.
The way this technology is being used clearly violates the intent behind copyright law, it undermines its goals and results in harm that it was designed to prevent. I believe that doing this without extensive public discussion and consensus is anti-democratic.
We always end up discussing concrete implementation details of how copyright is currently enforced, never the concept itself. Is there a good word for this? Reification?
This has not been my experience. These days they are pretty good at googling though.
And even if one could, it would be illegal to do. Always found this argument for AI data laundering weird.
The judge presiding over this case has already issued a ruling to the effect that training an LLM like Anthropic's AI with legally acquired material is in fact fair use. So unless someone comes up with some novel claims that weren't already attempted, claims that a different form of AI is significantly different from a copyright perspective from an LLM or tries their hand in a different circuit to get a split decision, the "jury" is pretty much settled on how fair use applies to AI. Legally acquired material used to train LLMs is fair use. Illegally obtaining copies of material is not fair use, and the transformative nature of LLMs don't retroactively make it fair use.
Which is one fundamental things how copyright is handled. Copying in general or performing multiple times. So I can accept argument that training model onetime and then using singular instance of that model is analogues to human learning.
But when you get to running multiple copies of model, we are clearly past that.
It remains deranged.
Everyone has more than a right to freely have read everything is stored in a library.
(Edit: in fact initially I wrote 'is supposed to' in place of 'has more than a right to' - meaning that "knowledge is there, we made it available: you are supposed to access it, with the fullest encouragement").
Additionally, sharing copyrighted works without permission... the data sets or data lakes... is its own tort. You're guilty just for sharing copies before even training. Some copyrighted works are also commercial, copyright with ban on others' commercial use, and patented. Some are NDA'd but 3rd party leaked them. Sources like Common Crawl probably have plenty of such content.
Additionally, there's often contractual terms of use on accessing the content. Even Singapore's and others laws allowing training on copyrighted content usually require that you lawfully accessed that content in the first place. The terms of use are the weakest link there.
I'd like to see these two issues turned by law into a copyright exception that no contract can override. It needs to specifically allow sharing scraped, publicly-visible content. Anything you can just view or download which the copyright owner put up. The law might impose or allow limits on daily scraping quantity, volume, etc to avoid damage scrapers are doing.
I have an author friend who felt like this was just adding insult to injury.
So not only had his work been consumed into this machine that is being used to threaten his day job as a court reporter, not only was that done without seeking his permission in any way, but they didn’t even pay for a single copy.
Really embodies raising your middle finger to the little guy while you steamroll him.
The settlement was a smart decision by anthropic to remove a huge uncertainty. 1.5 is not small, but it won't stop them or slow them significantly.
IIUC this is very far from settled, at least in US law.
Is this completely settled legally? It is not obvious to me it would be so
Awesome, so I just need enough perceptrons to overfit every possible copyrighted works then?
I think that this is a distinction many people miss.
If you take all the works of Shakespeare, and reduce it to tokens and vectors is it Shakespeare or is it factual information about Shakespeare? It is the latter, and as much as organizations like the MLB might want to be able to copyright a fact you simply cannot do that.
Take this one step further. IF you buy the work, and vectorize it, thats fine. But if you feed it in the vectors for Harry Potter so many times that it can reproduce half of the book, it becomes a problem when it spits out that copy.
And what about all the other stuff that LLM's spit out? Who owns that. Well at present, no one. If you train a monkey or an elephant to paint, you cant copyright that work because they aren't human, and neither is an LLM.
If you use an LLM to generate your code at work, can you leave with that code when you quit? Does GPL3 or something like the Elastic Search license even apply if there is no copyright?
I suspect we're going to be talking about court cases a lot for the next few years.
Sure, training by itself isn't worth anything.
Distributing and collecting payment for the usage of a trained model which may violate copyright, etc. that's still an open legal question and worth billions as well.
I'm so over this shift in America's business model.
Original Silicon Valley model, and generally the engine of American innovation/growth/wealth equality for 200 years: Come up with a cool technology, build it in your garage, get people to fund it and sell it because it's a better mousetrap.
New model: Still come up with a cool idea, still get it funded and sold, but the idea involves committing crime at a staggering scale (Uber, Google, AirBnB, all AI companies, long list here), and then paying your way out of the consequences later.
Look some of these laws may have sucked, but having billionaires organize a private entity that systematically breaks them and gets off with a slap on the wrist, is not the solution. For one thing, if innovation requires breaking the law, only the rich will be able to innovate because only they can pay their way out of the law. For another, obviously no one should be able to pay their way out of following the law! This is basic "foundations of society" stuff that the vast majority of humans agree on in terms of what feels fair and just, and what doesn't.
Go to a country which has really serious corruption problems, like is really high on the corruption index, and ask the people there what they think about it. I mean I live in one and have visited many others so I can tell you, they all hate it. It not only makes them unhappy, it fills them with hopelessness about their future. They don't believe that anything can ever get better, they don't believe they can succeed by being good, they believe their own life is doomed to an unappealing fate because of when and where they were born, and they have no agency to change it. 25 years ago they all wanted to move to America, because the absence of that crushing level of corruption was what "the land of opportunity" meant. Now not so much, because America is becoming more like their country.
This timeline ends poorly for all of us, even the corrupt rich who profit from it, because in the future America will be more like a Latin American banana republic where they won't be able to leave their compounds for fear of getting Luigi'ed. We normal people get poverty, they get fear and death, everyone loses. The social contract is collapsing in front of our eyes.
Or can they buy the book, and then use the pirated copy?
Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and printing them and selling them: not fair use
Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and making merchandise and selling it: not fair use
The idea that training models is considered fair use just because you bought the work is naive. Fair use is not a law to leave open usage as long as it doesn’t fit a given description. It’s a law that specifically allows certain usages like criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. Training AI models for purposes other than purely academic fits into none of these.
1. A Settlement Fund of at least $1.5 Billion: Anthropic has agreed to pay a minimum of $1.5 billion into a non-reversionary fund for the class members. With an estimated 500,000 copyrighted works in the class, this would amount to an approximate gross payment of $3,000 per work. If the final list of works exceeds 500,000, Anthropic will add $3,000 for each additional work.
2. Destruction of Datasets: Anthropic has committed to destroying the datasets it acquired from LibGen and PiLiMi, subject to any legal preservation requirements.
3. Limited Release of Claims: The settlement releases Anthropic only from past claims of infringement related to the works on the official "Works List" up to August 25, 2025. It does not cover any potential future infringements or any claims, past or future, related to infringing outputs generated by Anthropic's AI models.
Edit: I'll get ratio'd for this- but its the exact same thing google did in it's lawsuit with Epic. They delayed while the public and courts focused in apple (oohh, EVIL apple)- apple lost, and google settled at a disadvantage before they had a legal judgment that couldn't be challenged latter.
Or because you already got the judgement you wanted. Remember Athropic's training of the AI was determined to be fair use for all the legally acquired items, which Anthropic claims is their current acquisition model anyway. If we assume that's true for the sake of argument, there's no point in fighting a battle on the remaining part unless they have something to gain by it. Since they're not doing that anymore, they don't gain, and run a very high risk of losing more. From a purely PR perspective, this is the right move.
There's piracy, then there's making available a model to the public which can regurgitate copyrighted works or emulate them. The latter is still unsettled
And they actually went and did that afterwards. They just pirated them first.
A settlement means the claimants no longer have a claim, which means if they're also part of- say, the New York Times affiliated lawsuit- they have to withdraw. A neat way of kneecapping a country wide decision that LLM training on copy written material is subject to punitive measures don't you think?
Indeed, it is not only payout, but the destruction of the datasets. Although the article does quote:
> “Anthropic says it did not even use these pirated works,” he said. “If some other generative A.I. company took data from pirated source and used it to train on and commercialized it, the potential liability is enormous. It will shake the industry — no doubt in my mind.”
Even if true, I wonder how many cases we will see in the near future.
I was under the impression they had downloaded millions of books.
It looks like you'll be able to search this site if the settlement is approved:
> https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/
If your work is there, you qualify for a slice of the settlement. If not, you're outta luck.
You can search LibGen by author to see if your work is included. I believe this would make you a member of the class: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/searc...
If you are a member of the class (or think you are) you can submit your contact information to the plaintiff's attorneys here: https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/
https://authorsguild.org/news/six-takeaways-from-the-authors...
Median income was $3100 which is greater than the $3000 average award from the Anthropic settlement.
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settl...
But yes, one set of data is from 7-8 years ago, the other figure is from a few weeks ago. And median and average don't mean the same thing. And it's unclear how the population from the Author's Guild survey maps to the plaintiff class from the Anthropic settlement.
But it seems we're in the same ballpark.
I suspected my work was in the dataset and it looks like it is! I reached out via the form.
And if AI companies want recent stuff, they need to pay the owners.
However, the West wants to infinitely enrich the lucky old people and companies who benefited from the lax regulations at the start of 20th century. Their people chose to not let the current generations to acquire equivalent wealth, at least not without the old hags get their cut too.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2003/Lessigcopyrigh...
Lessig: Not for this length of time, no. Copyright shouldn’t be anywhere close to what it is right now. In my book I proposed a system where you’d have to renew after every five years and you get a maximum term of 75 years. I thought that was pretty radical at the time. The Economist, after the Eldred decision, came out with a proposal—let’s go back to 14 years, renewable to 28 years. Nobody needs more than 14 years to earn the return back from whatever they produced.
So the data/copyright issue that you might be worried about is actually completely solved already! Anthropic is just paying a settlement here for the illegal pirating that they did way in the past. Anthropic is allowed to train on books that they legally acquire.
And sure, Chinese AI companies could probably scrape from LibGen just like Anthropic did without getting in hot water, and potentially access a bit more data that way for cheap, but it doesn't really seem like the buying/scanning process really costs that much in the grand scheme of things. And Anthropic likely already has legally acquired most of the useful texts on LibGen and scanned them into its internal library anyways.
(Furthermore, the scanning setup might actually give Anthropic an advantage, as they're able to digitize more niche texts that might be hard to find outside of print form)
You mean does constitute fair use?
Western companies will be fine but sharing data in ways that would be illegal in the US does help other companies outside the US.
Can only imagine the pitch, yes please give us billions of dollars. We are going to make a huge investment like paying of our lawsuits.
> Although the payment is enormous, it is small compared with the amount of money that Anthropic has raised in recent years. This month, the start-up announced that it had agreed to a deal that brings an additional $13 billion into Anthropic’s coffers. The start-up has raised a total of more than $27 billion since its founding in 2021.
So long as there is an excuse to justify money flows, that's fine, big capital doesn't really care about the excuse; so long as the excuse is just persuasive enough to satisfy the regulators and the judges.
Money flows happen independently, then later, people try to come up with good narratives. This is exactly what happened in this case. They paid the authors a lot of money as a settlement and agreed on a narrative which works for both sets of people; that training was fine, it's the pirating which was a problem...
It's likely why they settled; they preferred to pay a lot of money and agree on some false narrative which works for both groups rather than setting a precedent that AI training on copyrighted material is illegal; that would be the biggest loss for them.
Yes, and FWIW that's very succinctly stated.
It basically does nothing for them besides that. Given the split decisions so far, I'm not sure what value the Alsup decision is going to bring to the industry, moving forward, when it's in the context of books that Anthropic physically purchased. The other AI cases are generally not fact patterns where the LLM was trained with copyrighted materials that the AI company legally purchased copies of.
By extension, if the big publishers are getting $3000 per article, that could be a fairly significant windfall.
Kinda how like patents will state the human “inventor” but Apple or whichever corp is assigned the rights.
> otherwise only the big companies who can afford to pay off publishers like Anthropic will be able to do so
Only well funded companies can afford to hire a lot of expensive engineers and train AI models on hundreds of thousands of expensive GPUs, too.
Something tells me many the grassroots LLM training people are less concerned about legality of their source training set than the big companies anyway.
Try to do that. There is no easy way to delete your account. You need to reach out to their support via email. Incredibly obnoxious dark pattern. I hate OpenAI, but everything with Anthropic also smells fishy.
We need more and better players. I hope that XAi will give them all some good competition, but I have my doubts.
Anthropic has made AI safety a central pillar of their ethos and have shared a lot of information about what they're doing to responsibly train models...personally I found a lot of corporate-speak on this topic from OpenAI, but very little information.
In the business where all the value is in data, all they lost is a bit of money.
It's not the way we expect people to do business under normal circumstances, but in new markets with new products? I guess I don't see much actually wrong with this. Authors still get paid a price they were willing to accept, and Anthropic didn't need to wait years to come to an agreement (again, publishers weren't actually selling what AI companies needed to buy!) before training their LLMs.
It’s not precedent setting but surely it’ll have an impact.
I would not be surprised if investors made their last round of funding contingent on settling this matter out of court precisely to ensure no precedents are set.
>During a deposition, a founder of Anthropic, Ben Mann, testified that he also downloaded the Library Genesis data set when he was working for OpenAI in 2019 and assumed this was “fair use” of the material.
Per the NYT article, Anthropic started buying physical books in bulk and scanning them for their training data, and they assert that no pirated materials were ever used in public models. I wonder if OpenAI can say the same.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
It reminds of the theoretically public beaches that are blocked off by privately owned land.
Is there a way to make your content on the web "licensed" in a way where it is only free for human consumption?
I.e. effectively making the use of AI crawlers pirating, thus subject to the same kind of penalties here?
I'm not sure to what extent you can specify damages like these in a contract, ask the lawyer who is writing it.
If you put a “contract” on your website that users click through without paying you or exchanging value with you and then you try to collect damages from them according to your contract, it’s not going to get you anywhere.
That curl script you use to automate some task could become infringing.
At this point, we do need some laws regulating excessive scraping. We can't have the ineternet grind to a halt over everyone trying to drain it of information.
The purpose of the copyright protections is to promote "sciences and useful arts," and the public utility of allowing academia to investigate all works(1) exceeds the benefits of letting authors declare their works unponderable to the academic community.
(1) And yet, textbooks are copyrighted and the copyright is honored; I'm not sure why the academic fair-use exception doesn't allow scholars to just copy around textbooks without paying their authors.
Also if there is a software library with annoying Stallman-style license, can one use LLM to generate a compatible library but in a public domain or with commercial license? So that nobody needs to respect software licenses anymore? Can we also generate a free Photoshop, Linux kernel and Windows this way?
Even might AI with billions must kneel to copyright industry. We are forever doomed. Human culture will never be free from the grasp of rent seeking.
EU has copyright exemptions for AI training. You don't need to respect opt outs if you are doing research.
South Korea, Japan has some exemptions too I think?
Singapore has very strong copyright exemptions for AI training. You can completely ignore opt-outs legally, even if doing it commercially.
Just search up "TDM laws globally".
OpenAI and Google will follow soon now that the precedent has been set, and will likely pay more.
It will be a net win for Anthropic.
That could push the industry toward consolidation—fewer independent experiments, more centralized R&D inside big tech. I feel that, this might slow the pace of unexpected innovations and increase dependence on incumbents.
This def. raises the question: how do we balance fair compensation for creators with keeping the door open for innovation?
Based on history this is not a possibility but a certainty.
The larger players - who grew because of limited regulations - will start supporting stricter regulation and compliance structures in order to increase the barrier of entry with the excuse of "Oh we learned our lesson, you are right". The hypocrisy is crazy but it makes sense from a capitalistic perspective.
The European and especially German approach of regulating pre-emptive might be more fair, but apparently it also stifles innovation, as we can observe. Almost no significant players from Europe and Germany.
TBH I'm just going to plow all that money back into Anthropic... might was well cut out the middleman.
Seriously, how will this money propagate to the authors (if at all) or will it just stay with the publishers?
But then, the countries with the freedom to add everything to the training dataset will have to distribute for free the weights in PI walled countries (because they would be plain 'illegal' and will be "blocked" over there, unless free as in free beer I guess), basically only what deepseek could work.
If powerfull LLM hardware becomes somewhat affordable (look at nvidia omega push on LLM specific hardware), "local" companies may run at reasonable speed those 'foreign trained LLM models', but "here".
Sounds harsh, if true. Making its use practical only for hobby projects basically where the results of Claude kept for yourself completely (be it information, product using Claude, or product is made by using Claude). Difficult to believe, I hope I heard it wrong.
Unless, of course, the transformation malfunctioned and you got the good old verbatim source, with many of examples compiled in similar lawsuits
> When each LLM was put into a public-facing version of Claude, it was complemented by other software that filtered user inputs to the LLM and filtered outputs from the LLM back to the user. As a result, Authors do not allege that any infringing copy of their works was or would ever be provided to users by the Claude service.
(from Bartz v. Anthropic in the Northern District of California)
Taken right from the VC's handbook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansi_K%C3%BCrsch
I'm not sure if he even knows, but that is almost certainly his tracks they trained on.
It would take time, sure, to compile the lists and make bulk orders, but wouldn't it be cheaper in the end than the settlement?
Anthropic went back and bought->scanned->destroyed physical copies of them afterward... but they pirated them first, and that's what this settlement is about.
The judge also said:
> “The training use was a fair use,” he wrote. “The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes.”
So you don't need to pay $3,000 per book you train on unless you pirate them.
They pay out (relative) chump change as a penalty for explicitly pirating a bunch of ebooks, and in return they get a ruling that they can train on copyrighted works forever, for the purchase price of the book (not the price that would be needed to secure the rights!)
I'd be curious to hear from a legal professional...
Give them this order : "I want to buy all your books as epub"
Pay and fetch the stuff
That's all
A judge making on a ruling based on his opinion of how transformative a technology will be doesn't inspire confidence. There's an equivocation on the word "transformative" here -- not just transformative in the fair use sense, but transformative as in world-changing, impactful, revolutionary. The latter shouldn't matter in a case like this.
> Companies and individuals who willfully infringe on copyright can face significantly higher damages — up to $150,000 per work
Settling for 2% is a steal.
> In June, the District Court issued a landmark ruling on A.I. development and copyright law, finding that Anthropic’s approach to training A.I. models constitutes fair use,” Aparna Sridhar, Anthropic’s deputy general counsel, said in a statement.
This is the highest-order bit, not the $1.5B in settlement. Anthropic's guilty of pirating.
I feel it is insane that authors do not receive some sort of standard compensation for each training use. Say a few hundred to a few thousand depending on complexity of their work.
It has been admitted and Anthropic knew that this trial would totally bankrupt them had they said they were innocent and continued to fight the case.
But of course, there's too much money on the line, which means even though Anthropic settled (admitting guilt and profiting off of pirated books) they (Anthropic) knew there was no way they could win that case, and was not worth taking that risk.
> The pivotal fair-use question is still being debated in other AI copyright cases. Another San Francisco judge hearing a similar ongoing lawsuit against Meta ruled shortly after Alsup's decision that using copyrighted work without permission to train AI would be unlawful in "many circumstances."
The first of many.
I haven't had this in a while, but I always hate it when I'm blocked by Cloudflare/Datadome/etc.
We are entering a world which is filled with corporate mafia that is above law (due to insignificant damage it can cause). These mafia would grip the world providing the essential services that make up the future world. The State would become much weaker, as policy makers could be bought by lobbying, punishments can be offset by VC funding.
It is all part of the playbook.
At least if you're a regular citizen.
They're paying much more than the actual damages because US copyright law comes with statutory damages for infringement of registered works on top of actual damages, between $200 and $150,000 per work. And the two sides negotiated this as a fair settlement to reduce the risk of an unfavourable outcome.
Thats a weird way for Anthropic to announce they're going out of business.
Imagine going to 500k publishers to buy it individually. 3k per book is way cheaper. The copyright system is turning into a data marketplace in front of our eyes
The main cost of doing this would be the time - even if you bought up all the available scanning capacity it would probably take months. In the meantime your competition who just torrented everything would have more high-quality training data than you. There are probably also a fair number of books in libgen which are out of print and difficult to find used.
You can follow the case here: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/bartz-v-anthro...
You can see the motion for settlement (what the news article is about) here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
Same racket the media cartels and patent trolls have been forcing for 40-50 years.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-series-f-at-...
In March, they were worth $61.5 billion
In six months they've created $120 billion in value. That's almost 700 million dollars per day. Avoiding being slowed down by even a few days is worth a billion dollar payout when you are on this trajectory. This lawsuit, and any lawsuit AI model companies are likely to get, will be a rounding error at the end of the fiscal year.
They know that superintelligent AI is far larger than money, and even so, the money they'll make on the way there is hefty enough for copyright law to not be an issue.
What a formidable moat against newcomers, definitely worth the price!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdtBgB7iS8c
Somehow excuses like "we torrented it, but we configured low seeding" "temptation was too strong because there was money to be made" "we tried getting a licenses, but then ignored it" and more ludicrous excuses actually worked.
Internal meta emails seemed to point to people knowing the blatant breach of copyright, and yet Meta won the case.
I guess there are tiers of laws even between billionaire companies.
It's less than 1% Anthropic's valuation -- a valuation utterly dependent on all the hoovering up of others' copyrighted works.
AFAICT, if this settlement signals that the typical AI foundation model company's massive-scale commercial theft doesn't result in judgments that wipe out a company (and its execs), then we have confirmation that is a free-for-all for all the other AI gold rush companies.
Then making deals to license rights, in sell-it-to-us-or-we'll-just-take-it-anyway deals, becomes only a routine and optional corporate cost reduction exercise, but not anything the execs will lose sleep over if it's inconvenient.
The settlement is real money though. Valuation is imaginary.
Writers were the true “foundational” piece of LLMs, anyway.
Because everyone is expecting AGI now and it's not happening with our current tech.
Because it turns out that nobody in the whole safety cult cares a whit for the human mind, the human experience, human art. Maybe for something they call "human values" in some abstract thought experiment, but never for any human decency. No, the human mind is just ones and zeros, just like a computer, no soul and no spark, to people in the cult. The cult thinks that an LLM reading a book is just the same mechanically as a human reading it.
Your brain is just emergence, your honor. Fair use. Blah blah Dennett Hofstadter Yudkowsky.
Do you feel safe?
Also passing on the cost to consumers of generated content since companies now would need to pay royalties on the back-end should also likely increase the cost of generating slop and hopefully push back against that trend.
This shouldn't just be books, but all written content, like scholarly journals and essays, news articles and blogs, etc.
I realize this is just wishful thinking, but there's got to be some nugget of aspirational desire to pay it forward.
Book authors may see some settlement checks down the line. So might newspapers and other parties that can organize and throw enough $$$ at the problem. But I'll eat my hat if your average blogger ever sees a single cent.