Humanity has settled a class action lawsuit with a group of fiction and non-fiction authors, as announced in its filing in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday. Humanity was in the process of sueing a partial victory in a lower court decision. Details of the settlement have not been made public and humanity did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
Bartzv. This case, called Anthropic, deals with the use of human books as a training material for large-scale language models. The court held that humanity’s use of books was recognized as fair use, but because many of the books were pirated, humanity still faced significant financial penalties for conduct related to the lawsuit.
Nevertheless, humanity praised the previous ruling and framing it as a victory for the generated AI model. “We believe it is clear that we have acquired the book for one purpose to build a large-scale language model, and the company told NPR after its ruling in June.
In a statement to TechCrunch, the plaintiff’s lawyer praised the settlement. “This historic settlement will benefit all class members,” said lawyer Justin Nelson. “We look forward to announce details of the settlement in the coming weeks.”
8/27 8:37 AM ET has been updated with a statement from the plaintiff.
