About half a million writers can qualify for at least $3,000 payday thanks to the historic $1.5 billion settlement in a class action lawsuit brought by the author against humanity.
This groundbreaking settlement is the biggest payment in the history of US copyright law, but it is not a victory for the author. That’s yet another victory for high-tech companies.
The high-tech giants are racing to accumulate as much written material as possible to train LLMS. It powers groundbreaking AI chat products like ChatGpt and Claude. These AIs can become more refined when you consume more data, but after basically rubbing the entire internet, these companies are literally running out of new information.
That’s why the humanity behind Claude pirated millions of books from the “Shadow Library” and fed them to AI. This particular lawsuit is Bartzv. Enthropic is one of dozens submitted to companies such as Meta, Google, Openai, and Midjourney about the legality of AI training on copyrighted works.
However, the writers have not won this settlement as the work was fed to AI. This is a costly slap on the wrist of humanity. This is a company that just raised another $13 billion because it was illegally downloaded instead of buying it.
In June, federal judge William Alsup sided with humanity and in fact determined that it was legal to train AI with copyrighted materials. The judge argues that this use case is “transformative” enough to be protected by the doctrine of fair use, a copyright law sculpture that has not been updated since 1976.
“Like readers who are aiming to become writers, the LLMS of humanity trained their works to turn hard corners and create something different, rather than racing first or replicating or taking them,” the judge said.
It was copyright infringement rather than AI training, and it was human settlement that made Judge Alsup to justice, and trials are no longer necessary.
“Today’s settlement, if approved, will settle the remaining claims of the plaintiffs,” Aparna Sridar, assistant adviser to humanity, said in a statement. “We are continuing to be committed to developing secure AI systems that help people and organizations expand their capabilities, advance scientific discoveries and solve complex problems.”
The judge is now Bartzv as dozens of cases surrounding the relationship between AI and copyrighted works go to court. I’m trying to refer to Hushopic as a precedent. However, given the impact of these decisions, another judge may arrive at another conclusion.
