Stewart has the right idea. Anthropic should’ve included more books; all the books it could get its hands on. The idea that AI is a “plagiarism machine” is a fucking ludicrous notion by unserious people. And that $1.5 billion is a ridiculous judgment as no actual author was harmed in any way by an AI “reading” their work that then transforms the text into tokens, runs that through the LLM’s network and then only keeps the weights at the end (no book text). That’s a really, really basic gloss of how LLMs work. If you accept that as plagiarism, then your brain is also plagiarizing any time it reads something.

I’d like to give an throp up side the head to anyone who instigates shit like this. Copyright prevents so much, and now the idiot left — after being against copyright maximalism for three decades — has gone to that camp because it now appeals to their degrowther tendencies. Fortunately, Stewart is on the left but not the now-majority idiot left.