Why Anthropic AI is finally paying me

Word came down last week of a court judgment that means, for once, that authors of books are going to get paid, including, most importantly, me. A federal judge ruled in Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, a class action lawsuit under the Copyright Act, that the AI company Anthropic had taken books from pirate websites, including one called Library Genesis (LibGen), without authorization. Anthropic, which has more money, apparently, than all the gods put together, will have to pay at minimum hundreds of millions of dollars to all the authors who it robbed.

When I saw news of the judgment, my first thought was, well, I’ve written some books. What’s in it for my bottom line? I emailed my agent, Murray, who sent me to a LibGen search engine published by the Atlantic. Generally I don’t like to read the Atlantic unless I’m hate-scrolling Covidian propaganda. But I went to the search, and, magically, more than a dozen titles with my byline popped up. Three of them appear to be repeat uses of my book Never Mind the Pollacks, which is a great American rock and roll novel, but we also published it under several different titles during a period where my career was swerving all over the place like a drunk who’s stolen a sportscar. A few of them are book reviews that I don’t even remember writing. But most of them are novels or memoirs that I actually do remember writing, for the most part.

The news is all good. Once the dust settles from the settlement, I’m set to receive $3,000 per book. Cha-ching! Daddy’s getting paid and going to Sandals. The irony in all this is that I’m not one of those writers who huffs and puffs about AI. I don’t believe that I’m some sort of irreplaceable, magical being. People still ride bicycles in the age of the automobile. As long as writers accept the fact that we’re potential roadkill at any moment, we can still go about our business.

I would have happily agreed for Anthropic to use my books to train their lit-robot of the future. But they needed to ask, which, I guess, is the entire point of the lawsuit. If they had asked, I would have said, how about using only my books to train the robot? Then I’d have a friend to talk to who would get all my jokes and would understand why people were mean to me when I was a sensitive young man. Instead I’m all virtually gummed up with Clive Cussler and Jonathan Safran Foer and Jesmyn Ward and whoever else Anthropic stole from the pirates.

Besides, I didn’t get into the writing racket for the money. I did it for the glory, the fame, the freedom, and, for many years, the drugs. With the Anthropic lawsuit, I now stand to make more off my books than the advances for my last five novels combined. My yearly royalties for three decades of prodigious literary output total about $100. A five-figure outlay just because an AI company got greedy means I can finally buy the Japanese toilet of my dreams.

OK, now, let’s run a test. Grok, write a couple of sentences in the voice of Neal Pollack celebrating his financial return from the Anthropic lawsuit:

“Hot damn, the Anthropic lawsuit paid off big time, and I’m grinning ear to ear with this sweet financial win! Time to pop some champagne and keep writing – those AI pirates just funded my next masterpiece!”

That doesn’t sound like me at all. That’s the Impossible Burger version of me. My AI search engine says I don’t have to pay taxes on class-action settlements that cause me “emotional distress.” And those above sentences are quite distressing. I’m going to fight the IRS on this one. I’m a writer. Do they think I’m made of money?