More than 40 lawsuits have been filed against AI companies since 2022. Late last month, there were rulings on two of these cases, first in a lawsuit against Anthropic and, two days later, in one against Meta. Both of the cases were brought by book authors who alleged that AI companies had trained large language models using authors' work without consent or compensation. In each case, the judges decided that the tech companies were engaged in "fair use" when they trained their models with authors' books. Both judges said that the use of these books was "transformative"--that training an LLM resulted in a fundamentally different product that does not directly compete with those books.

Feedback is New Scientist's popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com Now and then, Feedback sees ads for courses promising to teach us how to become an excellent creative writer. It sounds like fun, but why learn to be a good writer when we can just do this stuff instead? One brand that recently caught Feedback's eye is BBC Maestro.

The BBC announced a new addition to its Maestro series of masterclasses, featuring its first posthumous teacher, Agatha Christie, presenting her writing tips in 4K video. The best-selling author of literature in human history teaches an 11-lesson course on writing mysteries, and the BBC seems very aware of the issues circling AI, which provokes a mix of intrigue and, honestly, wariness. Christie, who died in 1976, has had her likeness composited through a blend of licensed images, limited footage and past audio recordings. That data has been blended with actor Vivien Keene, who'performs' the words of Christie on video. This is a more cautious approach.

Editor's note: This searchable database is part of The Atlantic's series on Books3. You can read about the origins of the database here, and an analysis of what's in it here. This summer, I acquired a data set of more than 191,000 books that were used without permission to train generative-AI systems by Meta, Bloomberg, and others. I wrote in The Atlantic about how the data set, known as "Books3," was based on a collection of pirated ebooks, most of them published in the past 20 years. Since my article appeared, I've heard from several authors wanting to know if their work is in Books3.

In his afterword to the short murder mystery Death of an Author, the writer Stephen Marche invokes a concept called Moravec's paradox. Hans Moravec, a robotics scientist, observed that tasks human beings find challenging, such as playing chess, are easy for computers, while many of the actions human beings effortlessly perform without conscious thought, such as perception or oriented movement through space, are extremely difficult for the machines. Moravec's paradox is a useful way to think about the surprising ways that Death of an Author, described by its publisher as a "groundbreaking experiment" in artificial intelligence, succeeds. Jacob Weisberg, the head of podcast production company Pushkin Industries (and a former Slate editor in chief), asked Marche, a journalist who writes about artificial intelligence, to make Death of an Author earlier this year. The goal was a novella whose text was to be 95 percent computer-generated.

In my previous article, I have written about a content-based recommendation engine using TF-IDF for Goodreads data. In this article, I am using the same Goodreads data and build the recommendation engine using word2vec. Like the previous article, I am going to use the same book description to recommend books. The algorithm that we use always struggles to handle raw text data and it only understands the data in numeric form. In order to make it understand, we need to convert the raw text into numeric form.

Actor Danny Trejo, shown here in 2014, produced the documentary Survivors Guide To Prison, which focuses on injustices within the criminal justice system. Actor Danny Trejo, shown here in 2014, produced the documentary Survivors Guide To Prison, which focuses on injustices within the criminal justice system. Fresh Air Weekend highlights some of the best interviews and reviews from past weeks, and new program elements specially paced for weekends. Our weekend show emphasizes interviews with writers, filmmakers, actors and musicians, and often includes excerpts from live in-studio concerts. Danny Trejo On Acting, Addiction And Playing'The Mean Chicano Dude': Trejo says that his experience standing in the San Quentin prison yard waiting for a riot prepared him for acting: "You're absolutely scared to death ... [but] you have to pretend you're not."