Thus, I stand to receive about $9,000 as a result of this settlement.
I think that's fair, considering that two of those books received advances under $20K and never earned out. Also, while I'm sure that Anthropic has benefited from training its models on this dataset, that doesn't necessarily mean that those models are a lasting asset.
While I'm sure it feels good and validating to have this called copyright infringement, and be compensated, it's a mixed blessing at best. Remember, this also means that your works will owe compensation to anyone you "trained" off of. Once we accept that simply "learning from previous copyrighted works to make new ones" is "infringement", then the onus is on you to establish a clean creation chain, because you'll be vulnerable to the exact same argument, and you will owe compensation to anyone whose work you looked at in learning your craft.
This point was made earlier in this blog post:
https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2025/04/03/why-training-ai-can...
HN discussion of the post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43663941
The fact AI proponents can't see that is insane. Reminds me of the quote:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."