On Feeling Left Out of the Anthropic Settlement (Because They Ignored My Book)

In the summer of 2023, The Atlantic first published a searchable database of authors whose work had been fodder for training the AI systems at companies including Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI. Authors scrambled to check to see if their works were in the databases. Perhaps you remember the justifiably aggrieved instagram stories that followed.

“I felt incredibly violated and upset,” Andrea Bartz told The New York Times.

What a normal and beautiful instinct—feeling protective for your own intellectual output, for the fate of your creations. I wish I had access to that kind of purity. Unfortunately, my instinct was far more craven: simply wanting to be at the table. Even if it meant I was robbed.

Then, last November, a District Court found that Anthropic had infringed on authors’ copyrights by downloading published work from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, online datasets of pirated materials. The settlement established a fund of about $1.5 billion to pay authors and publishers approximately $3,000 per work. It’s the largest copyright settlement in history, and yet somehow feels wildly inadequate relative to Anthropic’s future profitability, which seems to come necessarily at the expense of future human-created work.

To qualify for this potential cash payout, authors had to meet a few criteria, including that Anthropic must have downloaded your book from one of those two datasets, and that you had to have an International Standard Book Number or registration with the U.S. Copyright Office within five years of publication.

I had a book published by an imprint of Macmillan in March 2022, so, naturally, I searched in The Atlantic’s databases, published as part of their great AI Watchdog project. And lo, my book did show up in LibGen, a bundle of 7.5 million+ books and 81 million+ research papers that was created in Russia in 2008 and has since been making its way around the internet. It’s proven immune to publisher attempts to shut it down, and it’s been used by OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and maybe others.

But then. I went to check the Works List Lookup in the official Anthropic Copyright Settlement website. And my book was nowhere to be found.

So…my work was in LibGen. But it’s not in the Works List. I can only conclude that Anthropic COULD HAVE downloaded my book but…somehow chose not to? Is this human discretion? Does this mean someone at Anthropic was clicking through different PDFs, looked with human eyes at my book’s cover and description and said, no, we won’t be needing a riveting and vivid account of the creation of the most important part of modern finance, and the fascinating, quixotic character who drove it. That doesn’t sound very contributive to the sum of human knowledge. …That’s so much worse.

Why was I unharmed? Harm me! Choose me! Love me!

Suddenly I understood a very specific moment with a specific character from one of the most memorable mental turnabouts in Jennifer Egan’s dizzying book A Visit From The Goon Squad (highly rated yet still underrated!): Kitty Jackson.

The moment in question is in Chapter 8—“Selling The General”—narrated by the disgraced PR executive Dolly Peale. Dolly was at the pinnacle of the PR industry in New York until she threw a disastrous New Year’s Eve party. Her festive decor involved shining spotlights through transparent acrylic trays holding oil and water suspended above the party, but the spotlights heated the liquid, melting the trays until they collapsed and sent drips of scalding oil down into the 500 A-list celebrity guests, burning and disfiguring them. Dolly watched this happen, in shock, and failed to call 911. Afterwards, all her money went to paying her guests settlements, she spent six months in prison for criminal negligence, and her career was over.

The book picks up with her two years later as she seeks to restart her career by rehabbing the image of “The General,” a genocidal dictator in some unnamed country; her job, as a publicist, is to soften his image, after all the genocide.

“Dolly’s first big idea was the hat. She picked teal blue, fuzzy, with flaps that came down over the general’s large dried-apricot ears. The ears were unsightly, Dolly thought, and best covered up…He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?”

Her other big idea, after the hat, is setting The General up with an aging starlet, Kitty Jackson, whose star needed a bit of shine too. Dolly arranges for them to meet, on a trip to The General’s country. And it’s on this trip, when Kitty removes her sweatshirt, that Dolly sees burn marks on Kitty’s arms. Like burns one might get from drips of scalding oil—as if Kitty had been at Dolly’s disastrous NYE party. But Dolly knew Kitty wasn’t there—she remembered the guest list. Kitty admits that no, she wasn’t at the party—she created her burns herself, to look as though she had been. Actually a lot of people had done that, she tells Dolly. Everyone had wanted to appear as though they were one of the 500 at that party.

This was brilliant when Jennifer Egan wrote it, but now, for me, it is too real. I want to appear as though I was at the famous-author party. Surely I can have this in common with Zadie Smith, Sarah Silverman, and Michael Chabon. My work too was pirated! I am aggrieved! I may not be a very recognizable name in the world of literary arts, I don’t often get invited to all your literary galas, but surely this is a bar I can clear?

But the sick thing about publishing a book is that before you do it, it looks like publishing itself is the unimaginable achievement, the enormously high bar. And it is! But once you make it over that bar, you see that there’s no end to the prizes—real and imagined, good and harmful—available to win in the world, and that you see yourself not winning.

I imagine this is what Paris Hilton’s neighbor might have felt during the Bling Ring robberies. Sitting in their house, unrobbed, rich, and abstractly disappointed. My home, too, is full of expensive handbags! TVs, jewelry, the lot! Why was I unharmed? Harm me! Choose me! Love me!

Of course no one actually wants their work fed into the AI slop machine. And no one actually wanted scalding oil dripped onto them from above at a NYE party. But one does want to be included, involved. Relevant and invited. It’s tragic, but I want to have been at the party, fed into the AI, have hot oil poured on me. (Although in this case, the hot oil pouring onto the A-list celebrity guests, the authors, is made out of their own talent.)

I will not be pouring my own scalding talent onto my arms, will not be feeding my book into Claude’s insatiable, inanimate maw. I just have some questions for the human in the loop at Anthropic.

For those of you with authentic burns: the deadline to submit a claim form in the Anthropic settlement is Monday, March 30. See the settlement website for more.