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Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

nytimes.com

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Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#471

Post by godelski »

Finbel wrote: post #414
phillipcarter wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm "team Anthropic" if we're stack ranking the major American labs pumping out SOTA models by ethics or whatever, but there is no universe in which a company like them operating in this competitive environment didn't pirate the books.

"ethics or whatever" seem like a good tagline for people rooting for an AI-company when it's being sued by authors.

Makes sense why Effective Altruism is so popular. Commit crime, make billions, give back when dead, live guilt free?

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#472

Post by crote »

fn-mote wrote: post #303
crote wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Option 1: $183B valuation, $1.5B settlement. Option 2: near-$0 valuation, $15M purchasing cost. To an investor, that just looks like a pretty good deal, I reckon. It's just the cost of doing business - which in my opionion is exactly what is wrong with practices like these.

> which in my opionion is exactly what is wrong with practices like these. What's actually wrong with this? They paid $1.5B for a bunch of pirated books. Seems like a fair price to me, but what do I know. The settlement should reflect society's belief of the cost or deterrent, I'm not sure which (maybe both). This might be controversial, but I think a free society needs to let people break the rules if they are willi…

Should I be allowed to walk into the Louvre, steal the Mona Lisa, then pay $10.000 once caught? Should I be allowed to do this if I am employed by Stealing The Mona Lisa, LLC?

> They paid $1.5B for a bunch of pirated books.

They didn't pay, they settled. And considering flesh-and-blood people get sued for tens of thousands per download when there isn't a profit motive, that's a bargain.

> The settlement should reflect society's belief of the cost or deterrent.

No, it reflects the maximum amount the lawyers believe they can get out of them.

> This might be controversial, but I think a free society needs to let people break the rules if they are willing to pay the cost.

So how much should a politician need to pay to legally murder their opponent? Are you okay with your ex killing you for a $5000 fine?

> Imagine if you couldn't speed in a car.

Speed enough and you lose your license, no need to imagine.

Why does this company get away with it, but do warez groups get raided by SWAT teams, labeled a "criminal enterprise" or "crime gang", and sentenced to decades in jail? Why does the law not apply when you are rich?

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#473

Post by repeekad »

33MHz-i486 wrote: post #400
jimmaswell wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was faster to just put unlicensed taxis on the streets and use investor money to pay fines and lobby for favorable legislation And thank god they did. There was no perfectly legal channel to fix the taxi cartel. Now you don't even have to use Uber in many of these places because taxis had to compete - they otherwise never would have stopped pulling the "credit card reader is broken" scam, taking long routes on p…

i dont know that its such a great thing in the end. Uber/Lyft is 50-100% more expensive now than taxis were before. Theyre entrenched in different ways.

Did you remember to factor in well over 30% inflation in America in the past 5 years plus Uber Lyft initially losing money on rides to capture market share before they eventually had to actually breakeven?

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#474

Post by sim7c00 »

rchaud wrote: post #228
aeon_ai wrote: post #8

To 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.

> Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. But nobody was ever going to that, not when there are billions in VC dollars at stake for whoever moves fastest. Everybody will simply risk the fine, which tends to not be anywhere close to enough to have a deterrent effect in the future. That is like saying Uber would have not had any problems if they just entered into a licensing contract wit…

actually NL is training a GPT on only materials they bought fairly.

it wont be a chatgpt or coding model ofc, thats not what they go for, but it'll be interesting to see its quality as its all fairly and honestly done. transparently.

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#475

Post by Ekaros »

jack_pp wrote: post #427
ab5tract wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas is priced lower when counting for inflation, isn’t it?

But drivers got to eat

Why don't they just order it on food delivery. I heard that it massively cut margins on the greedy restaurants, so can't be inflation there...

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#476

Post by LunaSea »

nl wrote: post #320
vkou wrote: post #311

Earlier 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…

> knowledge should be free

As soo as OpenAI open sources their model's source code I'll agree.

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#477

Post by godelski »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #460
zmmmmm wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a free society needs to let people break the rules if they are willing to pay the cost so you don't think super rich people should be bound by laws at all? Unless you made the cost proportional to (maybe expontial to) somebody's wealth, you would be creating a completely lawless class who would wreak havoc on society.

The law was not broken by "super rich people". It was broken by a company of people who were not very rich at all and have managed to produce billions in value (not dollars, value) by breaking said laws. They're not trafficking humans or doing predatory lending, they're building AI. This is why our judicial system literally handles things on a case by case basis.

I just want to make sure I understand this correctly.

Your argument is that this is all fine because it wasn't done by people who were super rich but instead done by people who became super rich and were funded by the super rich?

I just want to check that I have that right. You are arguing that if I'm a successful enough bank robber that this is fine because I pay some fine that is a small portion of what I heisted? I mean I wouldn't have been trafficking humans or doing predatory lending. I was just stealing from the banks and everyone hates the banks.

But if I'm only a slightly successful bank robber stealing only a few million and deciding that's enough, then straight to jail do not pass go, do not collect $200?

It's unclear to me because in either case I create value for the economy as long as I spend that money. Or is the key part what I do what that money? Like you're saying I get a pass if I use that stolen money to invent LLMs?

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#478

Post by godelski »

dns_snek wrote: post #467
amradio1989 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fair use wasn't designed for AI, but AI doesn't change the motivations and goals behind copyright. We should be returning back to the roots - why do we have copyright in the first place, what were the goals and the intent behind it, and how does AI affect them? The way this technology is being used clearly violates the intent behind copyright law, it undermines its goals and results in harm that it was designed to pr…

  >  but AI doesn't change the motivations and goals behind copyright
That's the point they're making

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#479

Post by 3836293648 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #293
djoldman wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, the settlement doesn't. However, the judge already ruled on the only important piece of this legal proceeding: > Alsup ruled in June that Anthropic made fair use of the authors' work to train Claude...

The ruling also doesn’t establish precedent, because it is a trial court ruling, which is never binding precedent, and under normal circumstances can’t even be cited as persuasive precedent, and the settlement ensures there will be no appellate ruling.

I thought it was precedentual within its circuit until an appellate says otherwise? And the the SC eventually joins in when two apellates disagree.

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#480

Post by 3836293648 »

LunaSea wrote: post #476
nl wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> knowledge should be free As soo as OpenAI open sources their model's source code I'll agree.

And weights
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