As the year draws to a close, I have the opportunity to reflect on some of the news stories that have shaped the landscape for indie authors this year. I don’t want to fill your Christmas stockings with AI, so I will get the big AI news of the year out of the way today.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
Unlike last year, AI is no longer something that’s new. It’s no longer even something that is startling people with what it can do. Rather, it is becoming clearer what part it will be playing in our ongoing lives in the year and years to come.
There has been a steady growth in AI tools over the course of the year. Some of these are large-scale generative AI tools, like the text-to-video Sora, which became the fastest-downloaded app in history when it launched a month or so ago. Others have been more niche, such as the series of “recap” tools available for readers and listeners launched by the likes of Spotify and, most recently, on Kindle. And whilst many of these have caused outrage, firms have reacted very differently to creators’ concerns. Amazon has yet to really comment on its latest “Ask This Book” feature. Spotify, however, seems to have learned that one of the ways to minimize controversy is to be very transparent up front about what new tools do and don’t do.
The Anthropic Case Looms Largest
But the one story that has stood head and artificial shoulders over the others is the Anthropic lawsuit and settlement, now very much reaching its business end. The class action has seen a potential settlement of $1.5 billion, or $3,000 per title for half a million titles.
There are a lot of takeaways from that case. The first is that it is very much one ruling among many, made on different grounds from other cases still in progress—the takeaway being that you should approach it with great caution.
What the Ruling Really Says
Key points, though, include the fact that the ruling did not find that what Anthropic did with the books it acquired constituted a breach of fair use. Rather, the focus was on the fact that pirated copies were used to train its Claude AI. Meaning that, had those titles been acquired legitimately, the ruling would have had nothing to say.
We also learned how important the process by which copyright is registered can actually be. The class in the class action only contained titles actually registered with the US Copyright Office, rendering many indie titles—which we know to be part of the shadow libraries involved—ineligible. Many authors with traditional publishers also learned that their publishers hadn’t always taken steps they had assumed were in place.
Next year there will be more lawsuits reaching their conclusions, no doubt with many different outcomes. And we will take more steps toward our longer-term relationship with tools that, just a couple of years ago, might have seemed unimaginable.
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