Blood Money: The Anthropic Settlement
The actual audacity of it all
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by merchants, scraped, digested, weaponized…
Today, if this is relevant to you, is the final day to file a claim in the massive* Anthropic Copyright Settlement, and I just finished filing mine.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Yes, I put it off til the last minute, and other than my usual dizzying procrastination abilities, I definitely did that because I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to face it. I knew, because my agents emailed me instructions, that at least two of my books were on that list, and probably more. But it was so unutterably depressing to have to actually deal with that, and all it means. To have to accept this money despite the filth of it, because the world is too expensive not to and I have a child, and also know that almost all systems of ethics or morality toyed with throughout history would say that taking blood money sucks shit and taints the soul. I don’t know, maybe I hoped it was only two. I am, after all, small beer in all this, just a midlist genre writer hacking it up hackily. Maybe only a couple of my babies were used to straight-up fuck humanity’s hopes, dreams, potential, stability, and basic social capacity in thousands upon thousands of ways.
Fifteen.
Fifteen of my books were used in the gargantuan effort to train AI to replace us all to no good end whatsoever.
And that is not too much compared to writers more famous than I. My work was a small drop in the ocean than fueled these models. I’m not trying to make this about me, because it isn’t, so much as purge the absolute helpless rage I felt entering the names of such a swath of my life’s work into form fields to get a few trash dollars back when the damage is already grotesquely done.
Because I am a small drop in the ocean, but fifteen novels is not a small drop in the ocean of me.
I know a lot of you here don’t actually know me as a fiction writer at all. But that’s what I do. That’s been my life’s work since I was barely an adult. Social media comes and goes, but stories have been my passion, my touchstone, my everything. I’ve never been a vast commercial juggernaut with my fingers on the tastes of the masses. I have fought to keep writing the weird shit I want to keep writing even when it didn’t sell. I have fought to stay true to myself and what I believe is important while making enough money to live. It has never been easy. But each and every time, I have tried so hard to put art into the wild that is strange and beautiful and connective, that connects people one to the other with a daisy-chain of printed pages. I write books that are deeply and profoundly me, usually pretty uncomfortably emotionally available and vulnerable and wordy and out there and experimental—and painfully in love with this world.
And they just…took it. They took the best work of my mind and used it to build the very thing that is actively ruining just about everything all the time. They took the books I wrote for children and used them to make it possible for children to not bother with reading ever again. They took the books I wrote about love to create chatbots that isolate people and prevent them from finding human love in the real world, that make it difficult for them to even stand real love, which is not always agreeable, not always positive, not always focused on end-user engagement. They took the books I wrote about hope and glitter in the face of despair and oppression and used it to make a Despair-and-Oppression generator.
They took my heart and used it to replace me and everyone else.
I think what shocked me most is the scope of the theft. They didn’t take everything I’ve written. But they took something from just about every year I’ve been writing. All the way back to The Orphan’s Tales. The fucking Orphan’s Tales. A duology I wrote when I was 22. When none of this was even a glimmer in the eye of Sauron. When I was just a dreamer dreaming up fairy tales to tell by the fire, with no notion that they’d ever be published. And Palimpsest and Deathless and all the Fairyland books and Space Opera and a lot more. My whole life, scraped to teach a bot to replace every possible way to live in this world with more of itself. The grey goo of the soul.
These are little books. Even the ones that were bestsellers, they were books about the small and the helpless learning to be strong, about love and longing and strangeness, about hope and wyverns and rock stars and girls who turn in to geese. They’re full of queer people and marginalized people and hurt people and people who cannot find a way to belong to a world that doesn’t want them to be at all. They’re not some hot commodity that would be of obvious interest to the grindhouse corporate maw, they’re just little pretty things. Made with yearning, made out of the stuff of my marrow. They’re not easy and they’re not normal, they’re nothing like the hollow monotone insincerity, the false and hungry cheer of LLMs. But somehow they are part of that. Which means I am a part of that.
For fuck’s sake. My books are my babies. I poured everything I had into them. I made them in good faith that the act of telling stories was in and of itself beautiful and worthy. That they could touch someone, maybe change a tiny bit of how they see the world, communicate what I could not by any other means. They’re a thousand late nights trying to find the right words, a million despairs at elusive endings, a million ecstasies of finally getting it right, sheer tonnages of loneliness and self-doubt and pride and want and togetherness and joy, hundreds upon hundreds of moments of real genuine living that crystallized into the seeds of a story, the long searing thread of whatever it is in us that needs to create something or we’ll just die of not doing it, masticated, compacted, and vomited up to convince every corner of society that a phone is better than a person.
And there is no use-case for AI that doesn’t come down to just that, sooner or later.
I am angry. I feel disgusting. I feel complicit in all this. In the LLMs that are rejecting job applications and denying health claims and starving out whole sectors of workers and cockblocking anything approaching education and pretending to be a therapist or a partner or a friend and making certain that once all the jobs are gone, at least we won’t be able to make art anyone else ever experiences, either. It feels like they went back in time and mugged that 22-year-old doofus kid. Stole her fairies and her heroes and her lovers and chopped them up to make monsters.
I just wanted to tell stories. It’s all I’ve ever wanted, since I was a child. I don’t know what the actual digitized fuck Sam Altman and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and all these other ichor-dripping creatures of the oncoming feudal night want, or what their fucking problem is. Couldn’t just let us have an internet and try to live life. Had to Absorbaloff everything into their revolting oligarch-gullets. It’s certainly not to help anyone or make anything easier or improve anything. I don’t think it’s even to make money particularly, since they have it all already and constantly make dumbfuck decisions that hurt their profits. But they stole from so many storytellers to do it, to tell a story of a world that is nothing, contains nothing, produces nothing, and knows nothing.
I just wanted to tell stories. And I thought, for awhile, that for all the struggles and stress and weirdness of my job, at least, as far as jobs go, I made my living without hurting anyone. As long as you don’t start JK Rowling about with your influence, writing stories is a pretty ethical line of work. But there is no job like that, I guess. My weird little gnarly over-emotional purpley-florid babies are a small part of something that’s hurting more people, more severely, more deeply, than most other technologies could ever aspire to.
And again, I know in the grand garbage scheme of curbstomping us into serfs, my part in it is very small. But it’s mine, so I’m fucking mad. And hurt. It may sound stupid, but as I entered every title of mine into those fields I felt so personally betrayed by these ghouls. For fuck’s sake, my own books were part of what trained something that is going to skull-drill my own child’s education and job prospects. There’s really no way to Good-Place-math that to come out right, to make that not sting.
And I’m mad for all of us who were stolen from, forced to give the best of us to these corporations without our consent or knowledge, and only in retrospect, when caught, offered a few pennies from the lord’s purse to take or leave, but if left we get nothing and the harm still compounds.
Obviously, I’m not going to stop telling stories. But it’s hard not to thing this will happen again, to anything I write, because in the end $1.5 billion is only a lot to us. It’s nothing to the forces behind Anthropic, and that they can portion out so much and steam right on ahead should tell you just how *not massive at all this blood pocket change really is.
And it’s absolutely gutting. To live with it. To look at a list of the very specific actual grains of Fantasia I have, in my longest nights, held up against the existential darkness to say I was here, I had a heart, I used it as well as I knew how, I made what magic I could, I left something behind and know they were stolen, along with so many others, to be nothing but grit in a road paved through the wasteland fascists, liars, and tech vampires long to consign us to, just to allow their golden carriages easy passage and a comfortable seat from which to view the damage they so dearly love.
TRUTH
I am boiling with rage for you and everyone whose works were stolen for this villainy.