“Feed the monster!” A judge in the US has granted final approval for a $1.5bn payout in a class action lawsuit brought by authors against AI company Anthropic. The settlement was originally reached last year but some authors argued it wasn’t big enough, and that it overcompensated Anthropic’s lawyers. It was approved this week after a judge dismissed those arguments. It is still the largest known copyright recovery settlement in US history. On Novara Live, Michael Walker and Aaron Bastani note that the settlement was awarded because Anthropic pirated authors’ books. However, the judge ruled that training AI on copyrighted work was allowed. This, says Walker, makes the ruling less significant than it might have been. “The companies are using the corpus of creativity, without the original producers of that knowledge getting paid.”

From Novara Media via This RSS Feed.