It seems like you think AI will not replace artists/creatives, including creative writers, and I agree! I’ll say anecdotally, though, that the creative writers I know do believe AI generation to be an existential threat to their field. Not so much because they think machines can produce art at their caliber, but because they’re concerned that consumers of art won’t know or care about the difference.

I’m excited to be speaking about this topic at the Monktoberfest later this week.

"The fact that they believed this is legally useful because of the definition of fair use, so I see why the Author's Guild is emphasizing it, but the authors I know don't talk about it."

Perhaps "the fact they believed this [i.e., the infringement was intentional] is legally useful" for seeking statutory damages, up to $15,000 per infringed work (assuming registration was timely, otherwise up to $7,500), as this requires the plaintiffs to show defendants acted willfully

Without intent, statutory damages could be as low as $200 per work

Anthropic settled for $1.5B with Bartz et al. in an earlier case involving the same pirated copies. The Court in the Bartz case said that training LLMs with these pirated copies was not fair use

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settl...

""The training use was a fair use," he wrote. "The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative."

However, the judge ruled that Anthropic's use of millions of pirated books to build its models, books that websites such as Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) copied without getting the authors' consent or giving them compensation, was not. He ordered this part of the case to go to trial. "We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic's central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory (including for willfulness)," the judge wrote in the conclusion to his ruling. Last week, the parties announced they had reached a settlement."

> e.g. G.R.R. Martin

The hilarious outcome of this saga is people using LLMs to rescue the readers of the Game of Thrones series, since he has no intention of finishing it himself.

This reminds me of the peak of the crypto boom. I used to describe crypto as a mix of people who thought they could rug pull before they got rug pulled (seriously, go watch the Coffeezilla videos on Crypto Zoo) but beyond the scammers there were a whole bunch of people who not only didn't know why the finance system worked like it did, they considered their ignorance a virtue. They labelled their ignorance "disruption". Fresh thinking can lead to innovation but more often than not you have to know why something works like it does before you break it.

Do OpenAI employees really believe LLMs can replace GRRM? I'm tempted to say no but it's so crypto coded, I find myself thinking yes. It's again people who have no idea of what it takes to make a successful written work thinking they don't need to know how it works.

> Whenever I’ve seen AI researchers talk about the possibility of AI writing fiction they always sound very confused about why people read novels.

I wish it was just AI researchers. I recently recommended a non-fiction book to a friend, and they said they don’t have time to read anymore. They read an LLM summary instead (popular book, probably in the training data), and said they agreed with the core concepts. I was honestly stunned. The whole interaction felt completely foreign to me.

In TFA the comment about GPT-X finishing George R. R. Martin’s series without involving the author felt extremely dystopian to me. I felt enraged for hours afterwards. Have these people never read a book themselves for the pure joy of it? Were they only interested in the outcome or the “takeaways”?

It's good to know we all live rent-free in Dario Amodei's head

> Newly released court filings quote an OpenAI researcher saying: “I was just worried about optics (...)"

As a side-note, most orgs already cover the need to STFU in their training material for new hires, particularly how personal comments should not and cannot represent the company. I'm sure this lawsuit will be explicitly mentioned in upcoming versions of this sort training material in multiple orgs.

That's not interesting, it's just dumb. OAI (among others) plundered the whole internet to steal their training data, what difference does a single website, however "sketchy" or not, make?

At this point I think we're less concerned about the piracy and more about how they've been acting as cybercriminals, staging a major attack every few days. Other countries might have to start considering it state sponsored cyberterrorism if they continue to operate with complete impunity.

"Our model did an oopsy woopsie for the 35th time" does not seem like a valid legal defense.

I second this, this is the correct title, with maybe one addendum

Top AI Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work

Are there any studies that show it has actually put more authors out of work than the prior trendline?

The Authors Guild CEO was an experienced IP attorney. The guild's leadership and policy teams, while they are cognizant of optics, think like lawyers, not like PR pros or journalists looking to maximize clicks.

Note to self

Originally this was the top comment _and had a sub-thread^1 underneath it_

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49866516

The sub-thread has now been detached

Gross. I think there’s been a large overcorrection to stem away from the arts. Certainly I’ve seen that in Australia when looking at schools for my sons.

Agreed. In a recent interview, cloudflare's CEO/founder built an argument on the 'fact' that people pursue music for fame and money. No concept of artistic expression or positive impact on the world. It blows my mind how impactful your bubble and education are on your (lack of) perception

This is the fault of capitalism, under which you are required to sell your time and skills for cash to survive. Under this system, no one who isn’t independently wealthy can be an artist without commoditizing their art. So that’s the lens through which people view art: just another commodity to sell so one can survive, not unlike grains or oil. The quote also shows that the artist is fungible in this conception, only the output matters no matter how it got there, as long as you can sell it.

This is arguably just a form of arguing for "death of the author". When you release a creative work, in some form, that work is no longer just yours. The audience receives, experiences and interprets that work in their own way. While the author maintains some degree of "canonical" control over the work, once its in the open, the audience can (and does) do what they will.

We aren't exactly consistent with how we approach this either. For example, I agree that reading "GPT-5 will autocomplete [GRRM's] series" feels "wrong" in the same way that if Terry Pratchett's "Disc World" series was "continued" by some non-approved author that would also feel wrong.

But contrast that with something like Star Wars, when George Lucas dies, I don't think anyone is going to feel any strong discomfort with some random person writing new Star Wars stories, even if those stories use the canonical characters. I suppose Disney might have a problem with it, but as a society, I don't see very many people losing sleep over someone not licensed by the Disney corporation writing more Star Wars. Likewise Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry is long gone, and while Paramount has ownership of the IP, if someone wrote their own Star Trek stories, no one is going to feel like they don't "comprehend the distinction between art and fan fiction".

And for further contrast, consider IPs that are well and truly part of the public domain. Cthulhu was the work of one author but since his death the lore has been expanded by multitudes of people, and no one finds that distasteful or tone deaf. No one thinks the "Hades" or "God of War" series of games don't qualify for "art" because the characters and lore being written about were the works of dead authors and the new material is certainly not "authorized" by those authors or their descendants.

Obviously time and distance plays a part of this, but as a more contemporary example, I wonder how many people would lose sleep or feel any significant discomfort over unauthorized or even AI generated Harry Potter works, either now or post JK Rowling's death. At the very least, if this quote read that Gogineni would "rest easy knowing that even though JK Rowling has [lost the plot/is an awful person/pick your reason for disliking her or her later work], GPT-5 will autocomplete her series." would that make people as equally uncomfortable? In my estimation, I would guess it would fall somewhere between the GRRM version and something like new Star Wars material for most people.