MATT O’BRIEN, AP; Authors sue Claude AI chatbot creator Anthropic for copyright infringement
"A group of authors is suing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, alleging it committed “large-scale theft” in training its popular chatbot Claude on pirated copies of copyrighted books.
While similar lawsuits have piled up for more than a year against competitor OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, this is the first from writers to target Anthropic and its Claude chatbot.
The smaller San Francisco-based company — founded by ex-OpenAI leaders — has marketed itself as the more responsible and safety-focused developer of generative AI models that can compose emails, summarize documents and interact with people in a natural way...
The lawsuit was brought by a trio of writers — Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — who are seeking to represent a class of similarly situated authors of fiction and nonfiction...
What links all the cases is the claim that tech companies ingested huge troves of human writings to train AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text, without getting permission or compensating the people who wrote the original works. The legal challenges are coming not just from writers but visual artists, music labels and other creators who allege that generative AI profits have been built on misappropriation...
But the lawsuit against Anthropic accuses it of using a dataset called The Pile that included a trove of pirated books. It also disputes the idea that AI systems are learning the way humans do."
