Not All There Yet

To start with a disclaimer. No Chinese person has influenced this author in any way. 

One of my condominium associations has twice this year sent me demand letters and emails, threats, fines or late fees and service fees for being several thousand dollars in credit (as opposed to being in arrears). The bot without human oversight does not understand the meaning of parentheses!

Or... with human oversight. "Oversight" is one of those interesting words that means opposite things.

The humans then act as if they are doing one a great favor by correcting the ledger and reversing the fines, fees etc.

If any of our dear readers are renters or co-owners in a condominium, watch out for this and do not necessarily trust an accounting bot. Even if the parenthesis error is corrected, the fees and fines may not be reversed. AI has no shame.

Meanwhile, the Anthropic case will be paying out One and an half billion to an entire class of authors, and to the lawyers who litigated the case.

It was Claude (allegedly) that was trained on works of fiction harvested from pirate sites. Only a few authors very publicly gave pirate sites permission to share their copyrighted published works. It would be interesting to know if those authors have opted out of the settlement, but we will probably never know.

If Anthropic had purchased all the books in its library for training AI, that would have been Fair Use. Allegedly, they chose to stiff authors.  Allegedly, they are not the only ones.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry