What’s to celebrate? At most authors will get < $100 per work, and that only because Anthropic kept a copy of the works they’d pirated. AI training was ruled as “fair use” which is a disaster.

Get their ass.

Fingers crossed!

Please, please, please file!

Good lord. My very indie, self-published Gilliam-esque modern fantasy book was on this list, so, yeah, if you think you might be on it, you might be! www.amazon.com/Escaping-Hea...

oh hell yeah, kill the industry, it needs to die

Huh. I'm OK with it ruining the industry. I'm also A-OK with the industry restarting, but actually paying for the works they utilize next time around.

They even stole a book by an obscure writer like me.

Ooh, you could use the proceeds of suing them into oblivion to buy and fix up that church in Piqua!

A chance to bankrupt an AI company? Just point me in the right direction.

Meanwhile, Anthropic’s bot becomes a criminal hacker. www.nbcnews.com/tech/securit...

It would ruin them? Oh dear. How sad. Nevermind.

Oh no, Jeff Bezos will be ruined, oh no, please not that, oh no.

1,600 stolen works from you alone? That they used to build their infinite profit engine? Holy crap. End them! END THEM! I hate the LLM boom. I loathe it with every fiber of my being.

To my surprise, I actually appear to be part of the class. But the question I really want to ask is... 1600?!? You're prolific, but how does that work?

Yes, I just love how they blatantly steal the life's work of countless people, and then make tons of money on that theft, and don't pay any of the people that created the original works.

Is ruining an entire pirate industry a bad thing?

Please ruin the entire industry, pretty please

With a cherry on top. If you need more motivation, we can all ask for that as a birthday present. See, you would be buying millions of us a birthday present, and you don’t even have to do something you didn’t want to do! Win win!

fuck'em up, John

The article makes it out like it would be a BAD thing.

Note that to qualify the works have to be copyright-registered books with either an ISBN or ASIN, so that might cut the list of your titles down a tad, John.

Oh no! Please don't bankrupt the industry that is killing the planet so it can make inaccurate and often directly problematic "human-like" outputs. Why should we value the work of people who have spent countless hours, months, years of their life perfecting a craft? Go for it! Do it for all of us!

Have you considered writing a “nonsense” book - a book of gibberish that makes no sense to fuck with any LLM that might gobble it up? Probably hard to get someone to agree to publish a book of nonsense.

We wanna watch!

"If every author in the class filed a claim, industry advocates warned, it would "financially ruin" the entire AI industry." Well, then find a business model that doesnt rely on theft. "it paved the way for any AI company to simply fold when facing such substantial damages" See point 1

Wait, how many books have you written?

I hope every author files their rightful claim. I am all for the destruction of the theft industry, I mean "generative AI industry"

Also bsky.app/profile/alex...

Does anyone happen to know if non-US authors are part of the class? My work is pirated in LibGen for sure, but the form to collect the authors' information is not designed to collect non-US addresses. Can someone shine a light on whether this is by design or an oversight?

Screw them. Sue them. Ruin them. Thieves!😕

So, as someone who does these sorts of cases for a living, the settlement itself isn’t going to ruin Anthropic. It will be large and uncomfortable, certainly, but it’s going to be a discrete pile of money from which all the claims (and attorneys fees, costs, expenses, and plaintiff service awards)

will come. Lieff Cabraser is going to want as many authors as possible to file claims to be able to tell the court that their claims rate is high, but the more people who file claims, the less each individual claim is likely to be. If you have a $1M fund from which a thousand people file a claim,

Generally each claim would be looked at individually. It may be class action but my guess the individual damages cannot be assessed on a unit basis as all things are not equal, and equal harm isn't a thing in this case.

For a settlement, I assure you that is not the case. The settlement agreement will contain some mechanism by which everyone can file a claim, which will be the responsibility of the claims administrator to decide. It will be done in such a way as to minimize the CA’s work.

it’s a different situation than a $1M fund from which a million people each file a claim. Not everyone will be thrilled with the result, and Anthropic is only going to settle if it means that they can meaningfully continue their business model in some way. So certainly it is good that authors are

going to get money for having their works used without their consent (and without payment), but they will need to actually file claims and be aware that phrases like “up to $X amount” can often come in at a tiny percentage of that if the claims rate is off the charts.

@jonathanmaberry.bsky.social have you seen this?

I think this is a strong candidate for the "threaten me with a good time" event of the year.

At the end of this we want LLM to stand for: Large Legal Muddle

"If we can't steal from everyone, how can we make money?"

I looked at the form. You're going to list over 1600 titles & ISBNs???

I’m here to watch the financial ruin. I think it was one of the Chicago school Economists that said that if your business doesn’t create enough economic value to pay for its existence, it shouldn’t exist.

Count me in. A bunch of my scientific papers are in there.

If this bankrupts all the AI companies then good, it should

Crying about how it will hurt their business without acknowledging how it affects the livelihood of the authors. Typical corporate nonsense.

fuck ‘em up, John

If I'm reading this properly, given they openly crawled ao3, would that entitle to every fanfic author there to compensation? Because I will laugh so hard if fic is what cuts the Gordian knot of AI--pun fully intended.

That would be awesome, but I checked the name of the most prolific fanfic author I know & didn't find anything. Maybe you might have more luck?

It sure as hell looks that way.

I'm not a writer, why should I bother looking into this? <10 minutes later...> Sonofabitch! They actually even stole the single scientific paper I published!

It seems that saving Western civilization from itself falls on the writers. I would have thought a book on the subject would be in the SF section instead of History, but there you go.

bsky.app/profile/auth...

that's a lot of titles. i can see why you go by just John Scalzi.

Fuck 'em up!

Oh no, AI companies will go out of business because they engaged in illegal behavior! Really? Somebody remind them what happened to Napster.

We need this. We need everyone on this.

Wait, if y'all got together in class action, you could break Anthropic et al? WRITER'S GUILD - you have your orders!

Five of my books were in there, so yeah, go get em.

I can see lots of legitimate reasons for AI, but none of them are in the arts. Science, technology, engineering, all these have accelerated benefits to the quantity of data processing AI provide... But the arts require emotion, intuition, and personal connection. None of which are machine qualities.

Yes, and AI companies try to muddy the waters by acting like AI chatbots trained on stolen data, and AI used in scientific research and trained on ethically sourced data, are the same thing.

Ruin them! Ruin them! Ruin them!

So if my business model is "stealing food from supermarkets," when I get caught, I should just claim that "incarceration will destroy my business" and they'll let me continue? I don't think so. Theft is theft.

Will nobody think of the data thieves?

I want this industry financially ruined though. It's pointless

"Wah! My business model doesn't work unless I can claim other people's work is mine! Won't someone think of my capital!?"

And it should be ruined.

Well you better get to ruining then.... :)

LLM isn't and never will be "intelligent", the whole model is stealing other's people work and repackaging it for money...and it still loses billions of dollars.

So why wait? File now!

John's getting a PAYCHECK.

If your industry would be bankrupted by having to pay for its raw materials, rather than stealing them, it's not an industry, it's organized crime.

Dooooooo iiiittttttttttttt!

Imagine theft having consequences.

Andreesen is maybe the worst of them all