Humanity, an artificial intelligence company, agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit by the author of the book, which says the company received a pirated version of their work to train chatbots.
The groundbreaking settlement, if approved by a judge on Monday, could mark a turning point in the legal battle between AI companies and writers, visual artists and other creative experts denounce copyright infringement.
The company agrees to pay the author about $3,000 for each of the estimated 500,000 books subject to the settlement.
“As far as we can say, it's the biggest copyright restoration ever,” said Justin Nelson, the author's lawyer. “This is the first time in the AI era.”
The trio of thriller novelist Andrea Burtz and non-fiction writers Charles Greber and Kirk Wallace Johnson were sued last year and now represent a broader group of writers and publishers whose books downloaded to train Chatbot Claude.
A federal judge issued a complicated ruling in June that found that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books is not illegal and that humanity mistakenly acquired millions of books through copyright-infringing websites.
If humanity hadn't been resolved, experts say they lost the lawsuit after it was scheduled for trial in December.
“We're looking forward to seeing you in the future,” said William Long, a legal analyst at Wolters Kluwer.
San Francisco US District Judge William Alsup is scheduled for a hearing Monday to consider the terms of the settlement.
Why are books important to AI?
The book is known to be cautiously stitched with the critical data sources, essentially billions of words, needed to build the big language models of AI behind chatbots like Anthropic's Claude and its chief fly ball, Openai's ChatGpt.
Alsup's June ruling found Anthropic downloaded more than 7m of digitalised books “known to have been pirated.” It started with nearly 200,000 from an online library called Books3, assembled by AI researchers other than Openai, to match the vast collection that ChatGPT trained.
After the newsletter promotion
The debut thriller novel The Lost Night by Bartz was the lead plaintiff in the case and was one of the things found in the Books3 dataset.
Alsup later ingested at least 5 million copies from at least 2M copies from Pirate Website Library Genesis, or Pirate Library Mirror.
The author guild told thousands of members last month that it expected “loss is at least $750 per work, which could be much higher.” A high-settlement award – about $3,000 per job – could reflect a small pool of books affected after extracting duplicates and non-copyrights.
On Friday, Author Guild CEO Mary Raysenberger said the settlement was “a great outcome for authors, publishers and right-wingers, sending a strong message to the AI industry, pirated the author's work to train AI, and stealing people who can't afford it.”
