When Andrea Bartz heard about a new generation of chatbots that could imitate authors’ prose styles, she was deeply unnerved, and a little curious.
So she asked ChatGPT to write a piece of short fiction in the style of Andrea Bartz. The result was unsettling: it sounded just like her.
She felt furious and helpless, watching as a computer program instantaneously spat out prose in her voice. “It was very creepy,” she said.
To her surprise, Bartz got a chance to fight back — and has now helped to land a $1.5 billion settlement on behalf of writers who collectively sued the A.I. giant Anthropic for stealing their work. It’s the largest copyright settlement in history.
Bartz was one of three named plaintiffs, and she’s the one who’s immortalized in the case history — Bartz vs. Anthropic — since her surname comes first in alphabetical order.
It wasn’t a resounding victory. The judge, who determined that Anthropic had violated copyright law by downloading and storing hundreds of thousands of pirated books, also ruled that as long as the books are not stolen, using them to train A.I. programs is fair use because the material is transformed — a position that authors and publishers vehemently dispute. The case didn’t address the threat that A.I.-generated books pose to authors’ livelihoods.
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