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.
But as my fellow plaintiff Kirk Wallace Johnson put it, this is “the beginning of a fight on behalf of humans that don’t believe we have to sacrifice everything on the altar of A.I.” Anthropic will destroy its trove of illegally downloaded books; its competitors should take heed to get out of the business of piracy as well. Dozens of A.I. copyright lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI, Microsoft and other companies, led in part by Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, David Baldacci, John Grisham, Stacy Schiff and George R. R. Martin. (The New York Times has also brought a suit against OpenAI and Microsoft.)
Though a settlement isn’t legal precedent, Bartz v. Anthropic may serve as a test case for other A.I. lawsuits, the first domino to fall in an industry whose “move fast, break things” modus operandi led to large-scale theft. Among the plaintiffs of other cases are voice actors, visual artists, record labels, YouTubers, media companies and stock-photo libraries, diverse stakeholders who’ve watched Big Tech encroach on their territory with little regard for copyright law.
The dozens of lawsuits allege that A.I. companies (much like hackers, identity thieves and cybercriminals) tried to find ways to circumvent the law so they could lift what they wanted and benefit directly. This settlement, whether you consider it a huge victory for creators or think we plaintiffs should have held out for more, is a stress test of the rules, laws and norms that weren’t necessarily designed for the A.I. era.
From the outside, Big Tech looks more gigantic than ever. Witness President Trump hobnobbing with an obsequious coterie of corporate chief executives, including Apple’s Tim Cook, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, in the White House earlier this month. I hope people view this settlement as evidence that demands for justice can be won not just for creatives, but for all consumers. “A.I. companies are creating the future,” my fellow plaintiff, the author Charles Graeber, said. “But the crime itself is hardly a new invention. Theft is theft.” If we don’t want A.I. to become our unelected supreme leader, we must recognize that we have options and refuse to passively allow Big Tech to grow gargantuan and shape society without guardrails or consequences.
The works included in this case represent hundreds of millions of hours of labor and immeasurable dedication, creativity, vulnerability and grit from authors and publishers. We poured our hearts and souls into these books, and I’m not alone in feeling outraged that Anthropic brazenly pirated my novels in its unchecked pursuit of power and profit. Now the book publishing industry has sent a message to all A.I. companies: Our intellectual property isn’t yours for the taking, and you cannot act with impunity. This settlement is an opening gambit in a critical battle that will be waged for years to come.
Andrea Bartz is a novelist whose latest book is “The Last Ferry Out.” She also writes the Substack newsletter Get It Write.
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