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The evidence our lawyers have uncovered shows these companies knew they were breaching copyright, knew it would put authors out of work, knew it would degrade American culture. And they simply didn’t care. (2/7)

Many documents reflect disdain for authors and their livelihoods. One early OpenAI staffer wrote “Our work in this area will make people unemployed” and another “The better we do . . . the more worried genre fiction authors will become about us substituting for them on Amazon.” (4/7)

And that’s a capital D Disdain: “There will be a point where a bunch of artists express worry about what we’re doing here and we’ll likely ignore their concerns and release anyway.” (5/7)

But far more important – the documents also hammer home why the mass piracy for training purposes is not “fair use” under copyright law. Again and again, OpenAI and Microsoft acknowledged they were using copyrighted books to create new works that would compete directly with the originals. (6/7)

Acceptable economic disruption should be the argument for AI to send everyone a monthly cheque for purchase, use and resale of our data. Stealing our life stories one byte at a time.

Can we just treat these Ai bros like we did people using napster? Or those who still get harsh punishments for file sharing? Cut off their internet, and fine them 3x the money they actually have.