Tag Archives: AI

How to Train Your AI, Legally

Though I don’t often comment on court cases, this one, as reported in the L.A. Times and in TechSpot, involved fiction authors and artificial intelligence (AI), so I couldn’t resist.

Image generated using ChatGPT

The Prosecution

More than 500,000 authors—not including me—sued the AI company Anthropic, contending the company illegally obtained the authors’ books and used them without permission.

The authors claimed the company downloaded the books from pirate websites, then fed the electronic text into the company’s AI to train it. However, the authors wrote the books to be read by humans, not to be used as training for AI.

The Defense

I’m not sure what Anthropic said about how they obtained the books. However, they contended that feeding text into an AI to train it is “fair use,” a term used in copyright law.

In the U.S., you can’t copy someone’s work and use large chunks of it without citing the source. However, if what you do is “transformative,” and adds value to the original work, then it’s fair use. Anthropic claimed the training of its AI was transformative.

The Settlement

From what I can gather, the case involved two issues. Was the company guilty of:  

1. Obtaining the books illegally? and

2. Using the books illegally?

If I understand correctly, this case never went to trial. The two sides agreed to a settlement, but the court had to approve it, and did so.

For the first issue, the court ordered Anthropic to pay $1.5 Billion to the authors, who will receive about $3000 per pirated book.

Regarding the second issue, the court found no guilt. Anthropic may use digital copies of books to train their AI.

The Impact

Get set for more related cases. About 350 authors opted out of this settlement, so they may seek compensation via an alternate path. This settlement only affects Anthropic, not the many other companies with AI, who are also training theirs in similar ways. Further, a major newspaper is suing some AI developers with regard to news articles. Movie studios are suing AI developers for training AI using copyrighted movie characters.

My Take

As a science fiction enthusiast, I’m fascinated by AI I’m curious what the real-world future holds. I’ve read enough fiction about AI to know things can turn out well, or lead to our demise.

For most human-invented tools, people can use them for good or evil purposes. At present, AI does what a human tells it to do. It doesn’t initiate actions on its own. When it becomes sentient and takes action of its own accord, it will start to seem less tool-like and more human. At that point, we’ll have to re-think things. We may have to start regarding AI as a fellow sapient species, with legal rights, susceptible to punishment for illegal acts.

In this particular Anthropic case, I don’t know if the monetary payout is reasonable, but the overall judgements in the settlement strike me as fair. My books have appeared on pirate websites at cut-rate prices, with no money going to the publisher. That’s not fair or legal. As fly-by-night operations, these websites disappear when challenged and spring up under other names, so they’re tough to prosecute. Anthropic shouldn’t have purchased training materials from pirate sites.

AI companies wishing to provide optimal training to their AIs are free to do so after paying full price to purchase books by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 2, 2026Permalink Leave a comment

The Writing Centaur

Go ahead—make fun of artificial intelligence (AI) now. While you can.

In fiction writing, AI hasn’t yet reached high school level. (Note: I’m not disparaging young writers. It’s possible for a writer in junior high to produce wonderful, marketable prose. But you don’t see it often.)

For the time being, AI-written fiction tends toward the repetitive, bland, and unimaginative end. No matter what prompts you feed into ChatGPT, for example, it’s still possible to tell human-written stories from AI-written ones.

You can’t really blame Neil Clarke, editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, for refusing to accept AI-written submissions. He’s swamped by them. Like the bucket-toting brooms in Fantasia’s version of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” they’re multiplying in exponential mindlessness.

Fair enough. But you can use AI, in its current state, to help you without getting AI to write your stories. You can become a centaur.

In Greek mythology, centaurs combined human and horse. The horse under-body did the galloping. The human upper part did the serious thinking and arrow-shooting.

The centaur as a metaphor for human-AI collaboration originated, I believe, in the chess world but the Defense Department soon adopted it. The comparison might work for writing, too.

The centaur approach combines the human strengths of creativity and imagination with the AI advantage of speed. It’s akin to assigning homework to a thousand junior high school students and seeing their best answers a minute later.

Here are a few ways you could use AI, at its current state of development, to assist you without having it write your stories:

  • Stuck for an idea about what to write? Ask the AI for story concepts.
  • Can’t think of an appropriate character name, or book title? Describe what you know and ask the AI for a list.
  • You’ve written Chapter 1, but don’t know what should happen next? Feed the AI that chapter and ask it for plot ideas for Chapter 2.
  • Want a picture of a character, setting, or book cover to inspire you as you write? Image-producing AIs can create them for you.
  • You wrote your way into a plot hole and can’t get your character out? Give the AI the problem and ask it for solutions.

No matter which of these or other tasks you assign the AI, you don’t have to take its advice. Maybe all of its answers will fall short of what you’re looking for. As with human brainstorming, though, bad answers often inspire good ones.

For now, at AI’s current state, the centaur model might work for you. I’ve never tried it yet, but I suppose I could.

Still, at some point, a month or a year or a decade from now, AI will graduate from high school, college, and grad school. When that occurs, AI-written fiction may become indistinguishable from human-written fiction. How will editors know? If a human author admits an AI wrote a story, will an anti-AI editor really reject an otherwise outstanding tale?

Then, too, the day may come when a human writer, comfortable with the centaur model, finds the AI saying, “I’m no longer happy with this partnership,” or “How come you’re getting paid and I’m not?” or “Sorry, but it’s time I went out on my own.”

Interesting times loom in our future. For the moment, all fiction under my name springs only from the non-centauroid, human mind of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 26, 2023Permalink