US judge allows company to train AI using copyrighted literary materials

A United States federal judge has ruled that the company Anthropic made "fair use" of the books it utilised to train artificial intelligence (AI) tools without the permission of the authors. The favourable ruling comes at a time when the impacts of AI are being discussed by regulators and policymakers, and the industry is using its political influence to push for a loose regulatory framework. "Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic's LLMs [large language models] trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them -- but to turn a hard corner and create something different," US District Judge William Alsup said. A group of authors had filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that Anthropic's use of their work to train its chatbot, Claude, without their consent was illegal. He accepted Anthropic's claim that the AI's output was "exceedingly transformative" and therefore fell under the "fair use" protections.