Writing is a wonderful profession… in writers’ dreams! In reality, it’s a grind that’s comically unprofitable for the vast majority, to say nothing of the tortured ennui that comes with having to deal with actually writing, or the thought of actually writing, or the thought of what you aren’t right now actually writing. And the economics are more harrowing than ever, as the once halfway-decent living one could make from publishing a book is now going the way of the dinosaur as people read less, scroll more, and AIs hoover up intellectual property and regurgitate it with little to no remuneration.
And yet, for once, there’s some good-ish news for the writerly set. A landmark lawsuit against Anthropic, the company behind the chatbot Claude — and whose CEO recently said that it’s okay for their product to benefit dictators — has resulted in a settlement!
While it’s not quite the trillion-dollar lawsuit our AI overlords had hysterically claimed could bring about the end of their industry, it’s no small chump change, either, especially for the writers who can now get paid out per work that Claude devoured on its way to becoming a best-in-class product.
Per a press release from the plaintiffs, Anthropic is supposed to fork over $3,000 for each work covered in the settlement, of which there are something like 500,000. If over 500,000 works’ owners file, they’ll pay those, too. If under 500,000 works are filed for, their authors could get more for them. All in, the settlement is about $1.5 billion, plus interest. Also of note: This doesn’t completely indemnify Anthropic from further lawsuits if someone thinks their work is being used by Anthropic illegally. Even more, Anthropic agreed to delete the pirated works it download.
All told, it’s big news. The New York Times quoted one lawyer as calling the lawsuit “the AI industry’s Napster moment,” referring to the file-sharing network that was brought down by storm of lawsuits from the likes of Metallica and Dr. Dre.
If any authors think they had their books stolen, they can go to the settlement page here, sign up, and pray they get some cash in the mail. If they want to check if they stand any chance of getting the money, you can search the LibGen database, from which Anthropic illegally pirated the books in question. Sadly, as the author of this blog post hasn’t written any books, he will not be getting any Anthropic lawsuit money. But we know someone who might!
Kyle Chayka, a staff writer at The New Yorker whose work zeroes in on the intersection between technology, art, and culture, is the author of not one but two books that popped up in LibGen: 2024’s “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture” and 2020’s “The Longing For Less: Living With Minimalism.” Also in found in LibGen was the Italian translation of Filterworld. All in, he could stand to make upwards of $12K!
We asked Kyle: How does the sum of “$3,000 per class work” feel as a number given that his intellectual property was used to train an AI? Low, high, not worth it on principle, or about right?
“It should be a license, really,” he replied. “Because the training never goes away. So it could be $5,000 every 5 years, or $1,000 / year as long as they exist. But the price seems about right, honestly — a decent percentage of most book advances, and about the price of an institutional speaking gig.”
Fair! But does it make him feel any Type Of Way that his writing will be used to power machines hoovering up natural resources that will one day — per all the people making it — crush us like the ants we humans are to them?
“Even if AI couldn’t be trained on any book ever produced, tech would still find ways around it; the real licensing money will be ‘new data’ aka fresh journalism,” he wrote back. “So outside of my preexisting enmity and hatred for the way that AI is destroying civilization and the planet, I don’t think the books make it much worse.”
Again, tough, but fair. Finally — and perhaps most importantly — what will he put his potentially $12K settlement payment towards? “A down payment for a stone townhouse in a small Italian village driving distance from the coast where I can preserve what remains of my lifestyle,” he said.
“Ideally,” he finished, “without wifi.”
More on AI: Desperate Companies Now Hiring Humans to Fix What AI Botched