I Don't Think I've Written About Bratz v Anthropic. How Did I Miss That?

Pirated!

Bratz v Anthropic, or "the Anthropic case," as it's known at my house, was a big topic of discussion in my home for months last winter. Part of this is because I have a book involved and am thus a claimant in the class-action suit. Part of this is because we have a deceased family member who is also a
claimant. 

I see a lot of rage regarding the case and artificial intelligence in general on Facebook. On Medium, I see a lot of people writing about the glories of AI, even though Medium supposedly doesn't allow AI-generated writing. Or it hasn't in the past. Things are always changing there.

Bratz vs. Anthropic is confusing. I was confused about the two-part decision originally, but I think I've got it down now, and I have a couple of links to help explain what happened.

What Was Going On

Richard W. Stevens writes in Can AI Legally Be Trained Using All the Books in the World? | Mind Matters that Anthropic trained its chatbot, Claude, by creating a huge data base of copyrighted books. It got these books in two ways:

• It purchased hardcover books, tore them apart, and scanned them. According to Benj Edwards in Anthropic Destroyed Millions of Print Books to Build its AI Models these were used books. Anthropic was not going to its local independent bookseller or placing an order with publishers and paying full price.  
• It got digital books for free from pirate sites. They're called pirate sites, because they're full of stolen books.

In either case, the issue was whether copying these books for the use of training a computer program without the copyright holders' permission was copyright infringement.

Nobody Got a Full Win Here

The court found:

• Acceptable:  The court ruled that Anthropic using used books it purchased, copied, and trained its program on was fair use, because people can do what they want with a book after they purchase it.  Also, evidently training a computer program is considered teaching, and teaching books, say in schools, is also fair use. This is the portion of the decision I didn't originally understand. It wasn't clear in early articles that Anthropic had paid something to somebody. There was a sense that they had just taken work directly from writers, possibly because the books were secondhand, therefore authors didn't gain anything from the Anthropic purchase. 
• Unacceptable: Anthropic taking digital books from pirate sites to do whatever it wants with was not acceptable. Presumably because pirate sites steal books, and Anthropic was knowingly accepting stolen goods. On TV that's always frowned on. I guess the people at Anthropic didn't watch the same shows I do.

As Stevens says at the end of his article "the decision tends to encourage AI systems that train on other people's written works, so long as those works are either paid for or in the public domain."

Why Do Writers Care About AI?

Well, I'll tell you this writer's main issues with AI in publishing: 

1. Flooding the market with books, producing more material than the reading public can possibly consume and thus making it even more difficult for writers to afford to write. It's already difficult. It's been difficult for a long time. 
2. Lowering the overall quality of work produced, because AI isn't particularly accurate or literate at this point, and it enables people without knowledge of writing to produce lesser quality work and overwhelm the marketplace with it.
3. And, yes, I have concerns about AI being created with the intellectual property of writers who didn't have the option of choosing to be part of the project, some of whom were actually robbed of their intellectual property.

I've been hearing about too many books being published for probably twenty years. I'm talking before self-publishing became big and produced three and a half million books last year compared to poor little trad publishing's 600,000 and change. 

What happens when you have that many books being produced? 

Consider Coral Hart (not her real name) who claims that using AI she was able to write and self-publish 200 romance novels on Amazon last year. She's supposed to have racked up total sales of around 50,000 books. Get your calculators out, folks. That means she sold around 250 copies per book. That's probably not bad, since this article claims many self-published books sell fewer than 100 copies in their lifetimes. 

But imagine a multitude of Coral Hart's writing and publishing 200 AI-generated books a year. She teaches classes on how to use AI to write books. Indirectly, she could be responsible for a lot more AI books. More and more and more books to buy and read. 

You know what we don't have, though? More and more and more people to buy those books and read them.

It's interesting that Hart's got the side job teaching, because I see many writers doing that sort of thing now. Traditionally writers have had day jobs as professors, teachers, librarians, and bookstore owners. Insurance executives. But now I see writers are coming up with income producing gigs like running writers' retreats or businesses as on-line writing coaches. Just recently I learned that a rather well-known writer is selling on-line writing products that I don't understand, but they cost anywhere from 4 to 14 dollars. 

Why? Presumably because they can't sell enough books to make a living. 

There are so many books out there. Who thought we needed computer programs to generate more?

Get Back to Bratz vs. Anthropic, Gail

Oh, yes. Well, my understanding is that Bratz vs. Anthropic wasn't originally a class action case, a judge ruled it one at some point, which is how my family member and I and many, many other people got involved. Anthropic has been hit with a $1.5 billion payout relating to the digital books it took from the pirate site. It's not going to mean a great deal to individual authors, though. Each book can get $3,000, but legal expenses have to be deducted first, and tradtionally published writers have to split what's left with our publishers. 

Not a great pay day, but I like to think that by filing my claim, I've made some paperwork headaches for someone at Anthropic.

Or maybe they've got Claude taking care of all this. Yeah, I bet that's it.