{"id":1651,"date":"2026-05-31T19:08:29","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T19:08:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=1651"},"modified":"2026-05-31T19:08:29","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T19:08:29","slug":"ai-companies-used-their-work-local-authors-are-fighting-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=1651","title":{"rendered":"AI companies used their work. Local authors are fighting back."},"content":{"rendered":"<article>\n<div>\n<p><span>Nothing could prepare Hank Phillippi Ryan for the sight that many fellow authors have come to dread: several of her books, obtained without permission, were listed as some of Anthropic\u2019s training materials.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=1649\">Viktorina Kapitonova lights up Boston Ballet\u2019s \u2018The Sleeping Beauty\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cThat was disturbing, distressing, dismaying, and wrong,\u201d she told the Globe.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Ryan\u2019s work represents a small fraction of the nearly 500,000 titles that the AI giant\u2019s material used to create Claude, the company\u2019s signature AI assistant. Anthropic admitted to acquiring all of the work through back channels like Library Genesis without the expressed permission of authors, agents, or publishers. This has resulted in a class action lawsuit and subsequent $1.5 billion settlement \u2014 the largest in a copyright case in US history \u2014 set to be paid out to individuals who submitted claims by the end of last month.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span>Ryan welcomed the court\u2019s judgment.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cOur livelihoods are being protected,\u201d Ryan said. \u201cOur creativity and our curiosity and our imagination, this is all we have.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div><span>Get Starting Point<\/span><\/div>\n<div><span>A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.<\/span><\/div>\n<div>\n<div><label>Enter Email<\/label><\/p>\n<div><button>Sign Up<\/button><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><span>The outcome of the Anthropic lawsuit marks the first major victory for authors hoping to hold an AI company accountable for unauthorized copying of their work. Initially filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson in August 2024, Bartz v. Anthropic moved relatively quickly, according to Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger, and a settlement was preliminarily approved in September 2025. Estimates of payouts amount to roughly $3,000 per work.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>As of a fairness hearing on May 14, the settlement has not been officially approved, but observers said the hearing went well for the class. Final approval is expected soon.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>More lawsuits are in the works, including a large class action suit filed by the Authors Guild and Stephen King, George RR Martin, Jodi Piccoult, and 14 other authors in 2023 against OpenAI, and a recent suit brought against Grammarly for its unauthorized use of writers\u2019 names as \u201cexperts\u201d in their AI tool. The plaintiffs argue this is a violation of New York state laws prohibiting the nonconsensual use of a person\u2019s name for commercial purposes. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>In the May fairness hearing, attorneys revealed that the rate of claims submitted was nearly 93 percent.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Rasenberger said she has never seen such unity across the Authors Guild on a single issue when it came to how Anthropic acquired the material.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cThis is a profession where not very many people are making much money,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s no way that the unlicensed use of books in [large language models] is not going to further deflate writers\u2019 earnings.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Still, larger questions persist about the use of copyrighted materials by companies seeking to cash in on the AI gold rush, and more lawsuits are bound to follow. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cThis is existential,\u201d Rasenberger said. \u201cIt\u2019s not like anything we\u2019ve seen before.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>While many agree that the methods in which Anthropic obtained the books is flat out wrong, the issue of whether or not the practice of training AI on copyrighted material is a violation \u2014 something the court case did not cover \u2014 has authors divided.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cPeople hear a phrase like \u2018plagiarism machine\u2019 that sounds kind of catchy, and they repeat it without thinking very much about it,\u201d said Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author and staff writer at The New Yorker. \u201cIt\u2019s not an accurate representation.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Lewis-Kraus spent the past year visiting Anthropic\u2019s headquarters and speaking with about 75 people at the company for a profile written for The New Yorker, and recently wrote a follow-up on the heels of the highly-publicized standoff with the Pentagon over the use of Claude. In his eyes, that battle culturally brought a lot of goodwill to Anthropic. He noted that the night the conflict reached its peak, the Claude app shot up to the top three in the App Store from below #100. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Looking at the outcome of the Bartz settlement from the opposite perspective, Lewis-Kraus is not convinced the humiliation in court, nor the price tag, means much of anything to Anthropic.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=1647\">Somerville pop-up combines photo booth and art installation for a \u2018love letter to Pride\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cIf their revenue projections are at all accurate, then a billion and a half dollars? Just the cost of doing business,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>It\u2019s an exchange that most authors find unfair. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cThey\u2019re taking puzzle pieces that I created, which my publisher and I did not give them permission to use, and then putting them together to make their own puzzle,\u201d Ryan said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Every author who spoke to the Globe for this article had planned on filing a claim to collect the payout from Anthropic. But the payout is paltry, especially when compared to the financial juggernauts of the AI business. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cThis lawsuit gives us a small amount of money that we then split with our agents, and then [Anthropic] just can use it anyway,\u201d said Cambridge-based author Laura Zigman. \u201cSeems like a very small bit of compensation.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Still, she adds, it\u2019s better than nothing, which is what they would have received without the lawsuit. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cI think on a certain level we\u2019re all exhausted,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019ll take the scraps.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cUnless you\u2019re directly involved in the lawsuit, I don\u2019t think most people really know where to get information,\u201d said \u201cLittle Fires Everywhere\u201d author Celeste Ng. \u201cEven if you are part of the lawsuit, I don\u2019t think that it\u2019s clear where to find out information. I think everyone\u2019s just kind of in the dark.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The settlement does nothing to ease the concerns of how AI may drastically alter the craft of writing \u2014 a sentiment that can be translated to other workers in nearly every industry. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>In some respects, authors may see AI as less of a threat to replace them than other professionals. After all, if you ask AI to produce a full-length novel, it\u2019s generally not very capable of writing with a high level of creativity. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cHuman experience is the stuff that novels and all art are made of,\u201d says William Landay, the Boston-based author of \u201cDefending Jacob.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But what\u2019s real is the oversaturation of bookshelves and online stores \u2014 seen in the sharp rise of self-published books over the last few years. The security of marketing and other publishing jobs is at risk, even if authors may still feel somewhat protected. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cTo market [a book] and promote it and talk in-house and do the flaps, it\u2019s really valuable,\u201d said Zigman, who worked in publishing at Random House before becoming a full-time writer. \u201cTo think that all of that is very likely being done by AI is sad to me.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The future of books in the age of AI, and perhaps the future of LLMs, will be sculpted by the outcome of prospective lawsuits. Whether the technology is transformative or a regurgitator of copyrighted work remains to be seen in court, but authors, no matter their general stance on AI, are expecting their due.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cThe only reason they\u2019re as good as they are today is because they were trained on books,\u201d Rasenberger said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=1645\">Another Red Sox setback: Garrett Crochet dealing with lat issue, will get MRI<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Anthropic admitted to acquiring the work through back channels like Library Genesis without the expressed permission of authors, agents, or publishers. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1650,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>AI companies used their work. 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