Wired Cofounder Kevin Kelly Has No Problem With Anthropic Using His Books

Wired Cofounder Kevin Kelly has a contrarian take on the AI copyright wars: authors should stop worrying about being paid and start worrying about being left out. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion last year to resolve a class action from authors whose works were scraped to train AI models. Individual authors can receive up to $3,000 per copyrighted work. But Kelly, whose books include What Technology Wants, The Inevitable, and Out of Control, was not motivated by money. He registered for the settlement just to see what would happen and discovered his four books were in Anthropic database. Here is the twist: Anthropic never actually trained on those books. They were penalized simply for making the copies. I was disappointed they did not train on them, Kelly told the San Francisco Standard. 100 percent. But I am glad that it is in these libraries, because I think other companies are using them for training. I am interested in getting my ideas out there and being read. Kelly philosophy is straightforward: Infinitesimal is more than zero. Do you want zero influence or small infinitesimal influence? I want infinitesimal versus zero. He goes further, arguing that the next competition may be for AI attention itself. One day, authors might pay AI companies to be included in training data rather than the reverse. The weird thing is, they actually did not use that library for training, Kelly said. They were going to and did not for some reason but they were being dinged and penalized simply for making the copy of it. Kelly uses AI daily but for research, brainstorming, and critique, not writing. I have not been able to get it to write anything for me, he said. The main thing I use it for is research, and then for brainstorming and then for critique, like, what did I miss? It is sort of like an editor. He doubts AI will replace human storytellers entirely. We would probably have a distinction and want to hear stories that are just human-written, because we have a different affinity for our own tribe. On the business of writing, Kelly is blunt: It is like music we do not want to have a world where everybody is a professional musician. The value, he argues, shifts from the copy to convenience, personalization, and the relationship with the author. The Authors Guild and individual authors have sued OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic since 2023. The Anthropic settlement is the largest to date. Suits against OpenAI and Meta remain pending.