Paying AIs to Read My Books

Summary

Some authors have it backwards. They believe that AI companies should pay them for training AIs on their books. But I predict in a very short while, authors will be paying AI companies to ensure that their books are included in the education and training of AIs. The authors (and their publishers) will pay in order to have influence on the answers and services the AIs provide. If your work is not known and appreciated by the AIs, it will be essentially unknown. Recently, the AI firm Anthropic agreed to pay book authors a collective $1.5 billion as a penalty for making an illegal copy of their books. Anthropic had been sued by some authors for using a shadow library of 500,000 books that contained digital versions of their books, all collected by renegade librarians with the dream of making all books available to all people. Anthropic had downloaded a copy of this outlaw library in anticipation of using it to train their LLMs, but according to court documents, they did not end up using those books for training the AI models they released. Even if Anthropic did not use this particular library, they used something similar, and so have all the other commercial frontier LLMs. However the judge penalized them for making an unauthorized copy of the copyrighted books, whether or not they used them, and the authors of all the copied books were awarded $3,000 per book in the library. The court administrators in this case, called Bartz et al v. Anthropic, have released a searchable list of the affected books on a dedicated website. Anyone can search the database to see if a particular book or author is included in this pirate library, and of course, whether they are due compensation. My experience with class action suites like this is that very rarely does award money ever reach people on the street. Most of the fees are consumed by the lawyers of all sides. I notice that in this case, only half of the amount paid per book is destined to actually go to the author. The other 50%...