The (meagre) value of your books

Hurry up, clear a square and erect a monument to Andrea Bartz! The New York-based crime writer (little known in Italy: retaining the original title, only "We Never Were Here" has been translated, published by Mondadori, 368 pp., 13 euros) will go down in the history of literature – or rather, of publishing – as the writer who defeated artificial intelligence. It was, in fact, she who convinced other authors from the same publishing house – Bloomsbury, which, for the record, published Harry Potter – to sue Anthropic over the use of copyright-protected books during the training of Claude, thereby securing the payment of one and a half billion in royalties.

The ruling is of paramount importance for three reasons. First of all, in the long term, it marks a radical shift in the relationship between machines and humans, establishing that the creativity of the former depends on the latter, and that therefore every apparent innovation spewed from the virtual mouths of chatbots is a by-product derived from a raw material which, as such, must be purchased. Moreover, and we shall see this in the medium term, it alters the very concept of reading, with implications extending beyond mere machines. If AI is a machine capable of rapidly reading vast numbers of books to draw inspiration from them and produce similar works, we are slightly less powerful machines: we do the same by reading less and more slowly, but all authors began writing because they were inspired by someone else. You’ll see that, within a few years, publishing houses will be demanding ‘inspiration rights’ whenever they spot thematic or stylistic similarities, whilst authors will try to fend off such claims by declaring that they have only read books published at least two hundred and fifty years earlier. Finally, and this is immediately apparent, the staggering sum that Bloomsbury wrested from Anthropic isn’t really all that much.

There were 482,000 titles involved in the case: this means that their use by the AI – which will cost Anthropic a great deal of money overall – works out at the equivalent of €2,738 and change for each one. That, then, is how much any book you publish will be worth: this whole obsession with writing to become rich and famous is simply baffling.