In August 2023, alone in my studio apartment, I learned that my most precious possessions had been stolen.
During a break from working on my fourth novel, a headline flashed on my phone: “Revealed: The Authors Whose Pirated Books Are Powering Generative AI.” My heart raced as I typed my name into a database of works used to train large language models (which power tools like chatbots). Horror flooded my chest when several of my thrillers appeared. The companies behind these buzzy new chatbots had reduced decades of intense work to text files gobbled up by algorithms in a fraction of a second.
The despair didn’t last long. In August 2024, I became one of three named plaintiffs leading a class-action lawsuit against the A.I. company Anthropic for pirating my books and hundreds of thousands of other books to train its A.I. The fight felt daunting, almost preposterous: me — a queer, female thriller writer — versus a company now worth $183 billion?
Thanks to the relentless work of everyone on my legal team, the unthinkable happened: Anthropic agreed to pay authors and publishers $1.5 billion in the largest copyright settlement in history. A federal judge preliminarily approved the agreement last week.
This settlement sends a clear message to the Big Tech companies splashing generative A.I. over every app and page and program: You are not above the law. And it should signal to consumers everywhere that A.I. isn’t an unstoppable tsunami about to overwhelm us. Now is the time for ordinary Americans to recognize our agency and act to put in place the guardrails we want.
The settlement isn’t perfect. It’s absurd that it took an army of lawyers to demonstrate what any 10-year-old knows is true: Thou shalt not steal. At around $3,000 per work, shared by the author and publisher, the damages are far from life-changing (and, some argue, a slap on the wrist for a company flush with cash). I also disagree with the judge’s ruling that, had Anthropic acquired the books legally, training its chatbot on them would have been “fair use.” I write my novels to engage human minds — not to empower an algorithm to mimic my voice and spit out commodity knockoffs to compete directly against my originals in the marketplace, nor to make that algorithm’s creators unfathomably wealthy and powerful.
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The post I Beat the Chatbot That Stole My Book appeared first on New York Times.
