The author of the term "steampunk" sued Anthropic over pirated books used to train AI
Science fiction writer and Oklahoma resident Kevin Wayne Jeter, who coined the term "steampunk," filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, claiming that the company uploaded pirated works to train its large language models, reports Oklahoman.
Jeter, author of international bestsellers and New York Times-listed books in the science fiction and horror genres, joined dozens of other writers who claim that Anthropic's large language model Claude was created based on original works copied without permission and compensation to the authors.
"Anthropic trains these artificial intelligence models by uploading huge amounts of texts, including countless copyrighted works totaling billions of words. As a result of this training, Anthropic's AI models provide text responses to user queries in a way that is supposed to resemble human communication," the lawsuit against Anthropic states.
Throughout his career, Jeter wrote three official novels continuing the first film "Blade Runner," as well as several books in the expanded Star Wars universe, two books in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine series, and 15 original novels. He also contributed to the SCP Redacted short story collection, based on the popular internet database of fictional anomalous phenomena.
In a statement conveyed through his lawyer, the writer noted that authors might not have been aware of the option to opt out of the previous collective settlement with Anthropic and separately "fight for what truly belongs to them."
The previous collective settlement in the case Bartz v. Anthropic provided for payments of about $3,000 per work to authors. In contrast, the new lawsuit, which Jeter joined, demands that the federal court of the Northern District of California award plaintiffs $150,000 for each work.
"Steampunk is about human fascination with crazy mechanisms. There will be no AI-punk novels; to paraphrase Johnny Thunders, you can't hug a data center," Jeter said.
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