131–140 of 654 posts
For anyone who thinks the problem is Anthropic, I want you all to know that most authors make less than the median income. Most make less than $20,000 a year, because publishing houses give authors an advance, and then authors must pay back that entire advance in sales before they see a dollar of profit from their work. Most never do. Maybe publishers should JUST pay authors WELL, and get a book every 2-3 years. http…
For anyone who thinks the problem is Anthropic, I want you all to know that most authors make less than the median income. Most make less than $20,000 a year, because publishing houses give authors an advance, and then authors must pay back that entire advance in sales before they see a dollar of profit from their work. Most never do. Maybe publishers should JUST pay authors WELL, and get a book every 2-3 years. http…
For anyone who thinks the problem is Anthropic, I want you all to know that most authors make less than the median income. Most make less than $20,000 a year, because publishing houses give authors an advance, and then authors must pay back that entire advance in sales before they see a dollar of profit from their work. Most never do. Maybe publishers should JUST pay authors WELL, and get a book every 2-3 years. http…
For anyone who thinks the problem is Anthropic, I want you all to know that most authors make less than the median income. Most make less than $20,000 a year, because publishing houses give authors an advance, and then authors must pay back that entire advance in sales before they see a dollar of profit from their work. Most never do. Maybe publishers should JUST pay authors WELL, and get a book every 2-3 years. http…
For anyone who thinks the problem is Anthropic, I want you all to know that most authors make less than the median income. Most make less than $20,000 a year, because publishing houses give authors an advance, and then authors must pay back that entire advance in sales before they see a dollar of profit from their work. Most never do. Maybe publishers should JUST pay authors WELL, and get a book every 2-3 years. http…
There are a couple problems with this approach.
Firstly, while the median income is 20k, the book business is like films or music; ie not evenly distributed. At the top end are a small number of successful authors. They effectively subsidize the publishing house while the house throws advances at authors hoping for the next big whale.
Many books never earn back their advance. Meaning if the author was paid out of royalties they'd make less, not more.
Making advances bigger would result in fewer advances. The pot of money is finite.
This is all happening in a market where supply is unconstrained (everyone thinks they can write), and demand is very limited.
And before we discuss the value, or lack thereof of having an intermediary at all, it should be noted from your link that the median for published authors is higher than self-published authors. So clearly they seem to be making authors more valuable.
In truth of course, most (published) books aren't terribly valuable. Like music and movies most float to the bottom.
So no, the answer is not "pay authors more".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would imagine that for over 99% of the books covered in this lawsuit, they're earning less than $3000 per book. Put another way, their revenues wouldn't drop much if they simply hadn't trained on those 99%.
IANAL, but the parent comment quotes "any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement", which I take to mean it's the profit Anthropic stands to make based on its use of the pirated content that's recoverable. Given the entire global economy is currently bullish on the potential profitability of AI, I dare say they got off incredibly lightly settling for just $3k per book.
Exclude one book from the training dataset.
Did you make a worse model?
We actually know the answer to this, and it is: absolutely not.
The reality is this: your intellectual output is almost always only valuable to any company in existence in aggregate, never in isolation.
Death to copyright, which has always been far more harmful to small authors and creators than it has even been to large companies.
Let's have that conversation after the people strip mining the livelihoods of creators cough up for UBI.
For anyone who thinks the problem is Anthropic, I want you all to know that most authors make less than the median income. Most make less than $20,000 a year, because publishing houses give authors an advance, and then authors must pay back that entire advance in sales before they see a dollar of profit from their work. Most never do. Maybe publishers should JUST pay authors WELL, and get a book every 2-3 years. http…
For anyone who thinks the problem is Anthropic, I want you all to know that most authors make less than the median income. Most make less than $20,000 a year, because publishing houses give authors an advance, and then authors must pay back that entire advance in sales before they see a dollar of profit from their work. Most never do. Maybe publishers should JUST pay authors WELL, and get a book every 2-3 years. http…