yahoo!finance is reporting a victory for authors who are litigants in suits against AI companies using their books in training generative AIs:
Anthropic told a San Francisco federal judge on Friday that it has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit from a group of authors who accused the artificial intelligence company of using their books to train its AI chatbot Claude without permission.
Anthropic and the plaintiffs in a court filing asked U.S. District Judge William Alsup to approve the settlement, after announcing the agreement in August without disclosing the terms or amount. …
The proposed deal marks the first settlement in a string of lawsuits against tech companies including OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms over their use of copyrighted material to train generative AI systems.
Successful suits in those still-open cases could bring larger prizes yet, now that a settlement produced a “mere” billion dollars, excuse me $1.5 billion, and the three companies cited are cash rich. Juries, depending on presentations by the attorneys, are often impatient with manifestly unfair situations in which a corporation is gaining riches.
This, too, is interesting…
Anthropic as part of the settlement said it will destroy downloaded copies of books the authors accused it of pirating, and under the deal it could still face infringement claims related to material produced by the company’s AI models.
They may have to erase the data produced and start again. Will their AI be as accurate as the current AIs? In any case, I’m naive on both the AI and legal fronts, but it sounds like Anthropic looked at the arguments and decided they were in a hole and it was caving in on them.
And how will investors react to this rather large penalty? This isn’t like a line of research not panning out; this is a legal blunder and may be met with fury by people who expected a big return and only get a small one.
Or nothing at all.
