Chloe Veltman , NPR; Authors have mixed feelings about the $1.5B Anthropic copyright infringement ruling
"Graeber is among the more than 300,000 writers involved in the suit who may soon be getting a modest windfall. A federal judge in San Francisco rubber stamped a $1.5 billion settlement in July resulting from a landmark class action lawsuit the authors brought against the AI company Anthropic two years ago...
AI companies often invoke the fair use doctrine – which enables the use of copyrighted works without the copyright holder's consent in some situations – as they try to make the case in court for training their models on these materials...
Chinese AI companies often use a technique to build their models called "AI distillation." This involves feeding their models the outputs generated by other AI models, often high-quality U.S.-based ones like OpenAI's GPT-4 or Anthropic's Claude, instead of directly training them on pirated copies of books by American authors...
One possible way for authors to get a fairer shake in the age of AI could be through the licensing of their work to AI companies...
There are already some such deals between publishers and AI companies in place, such as Perplexity AI's agreement with media entities like the Los Angeles Times and Le Monde to license content for the training of its models. There are also online licensing marketplaces, such as Created by Humans."
