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

(www.nytimes.com)
989 points acomjean | 1 comments | 05 Sep 25 19:52 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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aeon_ai ◴[05 Sep 25 20:46 UTC] No.45143392[source]▶
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.

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1. dtagames ◴[05 Sep 25 23:15 UTC] No.45144843[source]▶
This is excellent news because it means that folks who pay for printed books and scan them also can train with their content. It's been said already that we've already trained on "the entire (public) internet." Printed books still hold a wealth of knowledge that could be useful in training models. And cheap, otherwise unwanted copies make great fodder for "destructive" scanning where you cut the spine off and feed it to a page scanner. There are online services that offer just that.