Authors Fight Back

I’ve joined the frontline against huge technology companies, and it’s personal.

In the US District Court for California, three US authors alleged that Anthropic pirated 7 million books to train its Claude AI model. Anthropic contested the allegation of piracy but did admit to downloading half a million copyrighted books without permission. One of these was a book I co-authored while an academic, ‘Creativity and Innovation in the Cultural Economy’, published by Routledge in 2009. I was then contacted by the lawyers for the three US authors and invited to join them; I was happy to sign up. More than 100,000 authors have now joined the class action, making it one of the most significant in the history of copyright.

The case against Anthropic exposes the grubby underside of AI. Not only do the big technology companies need to build enormous data-centres which use as much water and power every day as a city of 100,000 people. They also need to train their large-language-models on huge amounts of information. To do this legally would be very expensive, hence they work with sites that offer pirated versions of copyrighted publications (such as LibGen).

Okay, you turn on your computer and up pops an AI assistant. Why should you care about protecting poor authors from the illegal exploitation of their work?

Because most authors are in fact poor, as writing is not well paid. I authored seven books and dozens of journal articles while an academic and have authored three books of poetry since. My total earnings from all these publications would probably not keep me alive for more than a couple of months. That’s why the majority of authors earn their crust from work other than writing, such as teaching or the day job. Richard Osman and JK Rowling are the exceptions, not the norm. Most authors are driven by imagination, not money: by the desire to create something new and different. That’s where the books, plays, films and TV programmes that people want to read and see come from. And that’s why creative work needs to be nurtured and protected.