Buy a Book, Stick It to AI

If you hate the idea of artificial intelligence companies ripping off writers under the guise of “fair use,” buy a book. That’s what I did.

This was a big week in the ongoing copyright battles between creatives and the technology companies that used their works to train AI tools like Claude. The news broke on three fronts: Bartz v. Anthropic, Kadrey v. Meta, and Getty Images v. Stability AI. None of the developments were definitive, but they favored AI companies:

• A summary judgment for Anthropic concluded that the company could legally copy millions of books to teach its chatbot Claude how to write. “The training use was a fair use” because it was “exceedingly transformative,” the judge wrote.

• Two days later, another U.S. judge sided with Meta, Facebook’s corporate parent, in a case brought by several authors. While the judge suggested that AI companies are serial copyright infringers, he added that he had to dismiss this particular case because the authors “made the wrong arguments.”

• On the same day in the United Kingdom, Getty dropped copyright allegations from its lawsuit against Stability AI over its image-making tool Stable Diffusion.

I have mixed feelings about the practices at issue in these cases. Even if it’s technically legal (as yet to be determined), it’s not at all “fair” for AI companies to copy millions of books without paying for them. On the other hand, the chatbots these authors are unwittingly training have helped me brainstorm ideas, conduct research more efficiently, overcome writer’s block and create images.

As I contemplated this dilemma, I realized that we writers who use AI can at least show our gratitude to the fellow writers who are fighting these battles for all of us by buying their books. So can everyone else who chats with ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity and the rest of the AI gang.

With that in mind, here are links to the Amazon pages of the authors named in the cases against Anthropic and Meta:

• Andrea Bartz

• John Blase

• Ta-Nehisi Coates

• Junot Diaz

• Christopher Farnsworth

• Christopher Golden

• Charles Graeber

• Andrew Sean Greer

• Mike Huckabee

• David Henry Hwang

• Kirk Wallace Johnson

• Richard Kadrey

• David Kinnaman

• Matthew Klam

• Laura Lippman

• Tsh Oxenreider

• Sarah Silverman

• Rachel Louise Snyder

• Lysa TerKeurst

• Jacqueline Woodson

That’s a starting point to pay it forward. Pick an author you know — or one you don’t — and buy a book. (I chose “The Feather Thief,” by Kirk Wallace Johnson.) Then share this post and encourage others to do the same.

It’s the least we can do as we benefit from the minds that are helping make the machines of tomorrow.

(Ironic editor’s note: Top image created with ChatGPT)