Comment by js8
6 months ago
> The problem with this thinking is that hundreds of thousands of teachers who spent years writing great, useful books and sharing knowledge and wisdom probably won't sue a billion dollar company for stealing their work. What they'll likely do is stop writing altogether.
I think this is a fantasy. My father cowrote a Springer book about physics. For the effort, he got like $400 and 6 author copies.
Now, you might say he got a bad deal (or the book was bad), but I don't think hundreds of thousands of authors do significantly better. The reality is, people overwhelmingly write because they want to, not because of money.
I see where you are coming from: "My 8-yo son can also build websites".
Writing books is a profession.
Some people write full-time and make a living from it, through book sales, speaking gigs, teaching, or other related work.
Maybe ask Tim O’Reilly what he thinks about this so-called fantasy.
Like I said, Anthropic needs to stop stealing books or face the consequences.
No you don't see where I am coming from. And my father was a university professor. I am certainly not opposed to authors being fairly remunerated for their work, that's why I brought up that example.
My point is, the controversy is not an AI corporation vs 10^5 ordinary teachers. It's a battle of two corporations, or business models, if you will. But regardless of the result, most of the book authors will continue to get screwed, maybe the means will change. But it will not prevent them from writing, either. So I don't see any mass writers protests coming, sorry.
I also don't think Anthropic AI is going to be any less intelligent if it didn't read any modern fiction book, instead of reading a Wikipedia summary. Stories and myths are a human way of understanding the world, machines probably don't need them. And for non-fiction books - there really isn't that many irreplaceable high-profile authors out there. If it can't read, say, Feynman's Lectures on Physics, it can learn the same from 100s of other physics textbooks. Maybe they are slightly worse organized but why should superintelligence care?
you are correct