So the article notes Anthropic states they never publicly released a frontier model that was trained on the downloaded copyright material. So were Claude 2 and 3 only trained on legally purchased and scanned books, or do they now use a different training system that does not rely on books at all ?
Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
331–340 of 761 posts
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where can I find source that says Anthropic bought the pirated books afterwards? I haven't seen this in any official document. Also, do we know if the newer models were trained without the pirated books?
> Where can I find source that says Anthropic bought the pirated books afterwards? I haven't seen this in any official document. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43... > Also, do we know if the newer models were trained without the pirated books? I'm pretty sure we do but I couldn't swear to it or quickly locate a source.
Thanks for the link.
Among several places where judge mentions Anthropic buying legit copies of books it pirated, probably this sentence is most relevant: "That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages."
But document does not say Anthropic bought EVERY book it pirated. Other sections in the document also don't explicitly say that EVERY pirated book was later purchased.
I stopped using Claude when this case came to light. If the newer Claude models don't use pirated books, I can resume using it.
When you say, "I'm pretty sure we do...", do you mean that pirated books were used, or were they not used?
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same could be said of grand larceny. The difference would seem to be a mix of social norms and, more notably for this conversation, very different consequences.
I think the most notable difference is that grand larceny actually deprived someone of something they would have otherwise had, while pirating something you couldn't afford to buy doesn't because there was no circumstance in which they were getting the money and piracy doesn't involve taking anything from them...
Oh I wasn’t saying the two crimes are comparable in their own terms. But specifically the statements made by the comment I responded to apply to larceny as well as to piracy.
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#334To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training. It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data. Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
> pirating of the books is the issue
I have an author friend who felt like this was just adding insult to injury.
So not only had his work been consumed into this machine that is being used to threaten his day job as a court reporter, not only was that done without seeking his permission in any way, but they didn’t even pay for a single copy.
Really embodies raising your middle finger to the little guy while you steamroll him.
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everyone has more than a right to freely have read everything is stored in a library. Every human has the right to read those books. And now, this is obvious, but it seems to be frequently missed - an LLM is not a human , and does not have such rights.
By US law, cccording to Author's Guild vs Google[1] on the Google book scanning project, scanning books for indexes is fair use. Additionally: > Every human has the right to read those books. Since when? I strongly disagree - knowledge should be free. I don't think the author's arrangement of the words should be free to reproduce (ie, I think some degree of copyright protection is ethical) but if I want to use a tool…
> Since when?
Since in our legal system, only humans and groups of humans (the corporation is a convenient legal proxy for a group of humans that have entered into an agreement) have rights.
Property doesn't have rights. Land doesn't have rights. Books don't have rights. My computer doesn't have rights. And neither does an LLM.
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#336To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training. It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data. Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
I think the jury is still out on how fair use applies to AI. Fair use was not designed for what we have now. I could read a book, but its highly unlikely I could regurgitate it, much less months or years later. An LLM, however, can. While we can say "training is like reading", its also not like reading at all due to permanent perfect recall. Not only does an LLM have perfect recall, it also has the ability to distrib…
> Not only does an LLM have perfect recall
This has not been my experience. These days they are pretty good at googling though.
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems weird that there was legal culpability for downloading pirated books but not for training on them. At the very least, there is a transitive dependency between the two acts. Other people have said that Anthropic bought the books later on, but I haven't found any official records for that. Where would I find that? Also, does anyone know which Anthropic models were NOT trained on the pirated books. I want to av…
As far as anyone knows, no models were trained on the illegally downloaded books.
The following document indicates otherwise.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43....
"Similarly, different sets or “subsets” or “parts of” or “portions” of the collections sourced from Books3, LibGen, and PiLiMi were used to train different LLMs..." Page 5
"In sum, the copies of books pirated or purchased-and-destructively-scanned were placed into a central “research library” or “generalized data area,” sets or subsets were copied again to create training copies for data mixes, the training copies were successively copied to be cleaned, tokenized, and compressed into any given trained LLM, and once trained an LLM did not output through Claude to the public any further copies." Page 7
The phrase "Finally, once Anthropic decided a copy of a pirated or scanned book in the library would not be used for training at all or ever again, Anthropic still retained that work as a “hard resource” for other uses or future uses" implies to me Anthropic excluded certain books from training, not that they excluded all the pirated books from training.
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#338What about OpenAI and Meta? Are they going to face similar lawsuits?
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#339One thing that comes to mind is... Is there a way to make your content on the web "licensed" in a way where it is only free for human consumption? I.e. effectively making the use of AI crawlers pirating, thus subject to the same kind of penalties here?
No. Neither legally or technically possible.
Ummm.. terms and conditions?
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#340So if a startup wants to buy book PDFs legally to use for AI purposes, any suggestions on how to do that?
Reach the publishers or resellers (like amazon for instance) Give them this order : "I want to buy all your books as epub" Pay and fetch the stuff That's all
For e-books, there will usually be a license agreement that prohibits any kind of nonstandard use.
That's why Anthropic had to scan physical books.