For Sacramento creatives — or anyone who thinks that artists have a right to make a living off of their work — there was just reason to cheer a landmark court settlement against Anthropic. At a moment when Silicon Valley is blatantly stealing copyright-projected materials from novels, scripts, screenplays, short stories and nonfiction books in order to train its chatbots, a group of writers just forced the San Francisco-based A.I. company to pay out $1.5 billion for such swiped intellectual property. That amounts to about $3,000 for each writer who had their protected work infringed upon. 

It’s a start. 

Now the action shifts to newspapers. Microsoft, the parent company of OpenAI, is currently facing similar lawsuits from The New York Times, The New York Daily News, The Chicago Tribune, The San Jose Mercury News, The Denver Post and Orange County Register over its developers hovering up copyrighted words from journalists and then feeding them into different iterations of ChatGPT. Newspapers in Canada and Brazil have also filed actions against OpenAI on the same grounds. 

Right now, Microsoft has made it clear that it plans fight these lawsuits with a “fair use doctrine” defense. Well, we at SN&R sure hope our newspaper colleagues force Microsoft to take that defense in front of a civil jury. Fair use was enshrined as a legal concept to balance the needs of artists and creators to profit from their labor and sustain themselves, while also allowing a free society to comment on, critique, analyze or satirize said works and use elements of them for reasonable educational endeavors. How Microsoft thinks this doctrine can explain its tactics of pirating every word a news writer has hammered out in order to build chatbots that plagiarize and parrot the voices of those very writers as it seeks billions of dollars in investment, and ungodly profits for its shareholders, is beyond us.       

But, bring it!

There have been several stories in the news lately about A.I. chatbots helping young and unwell people commit suicide, or catfishing lonely individuals who don’t understand the technology, to a point where at least one of them got killed in an accident, so we would love to see just how sympathetic a jury of regular people are to the anti-humanists at OpenAI.

To tweak a famous film quote from one of California’s governors, when it comes to the newspapers’ attorneys, we want to ask ’em to go in there with all they’ve got and win just one for the writers. 

This is an opinion-based editorial by Sacramento News & Review.