<
https://theconversation.com/thousands-of-ai-written-edited-or-polished-books-are-being-sold-an-eerie-echo-of-orwells-novel-writing-machines-276008>
"At some point in the next several months, I am hoping to receive a modest
check as a member of the class covered in the class-action settlement
Bartz v.
Anthropic.
In 2025, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, best known for creating
the chatbot Claude, agreed to pay up to US$1.5 billion to thousands of authors
after a judge ruled that the company had infringed upon their copyrights.
When I first learned about the settlement, I assumed that Anthropic was
primarily interested in teaching Claude about the subject of my stolen work,
former socialist activist, British Labour politician and feminist Ellen
Wilkinson.
It did not initially occur to me that Claude might also be learning about how
I, Laura Beers, political historian, craft my sentences and translate my voice
to the page.
Yet there is increasing evidence that chatbots like Claude can be trained not
only to regurgitate an author’s content, but also to mimic their voice. In
March 2026, journalist Julia Angwin filed a class action suit against the
owners of Grammarly, alleging that the company misappropriated her and other
writers’ identities to build its “Expert Review” AI tool, which offers to give
editorial feedback in the voices of various authors, living and dead.
That a machine might use my writing not only to learn about my subject matter,
but also to analyze and ultimately mimic my authorial voice, points to a future
that George Orwell envisioned with eerie prescience. In his 1949 dystopian
novel “1984,” Orwell imagined “novel-writing machines” capable of
mass-producing literature, employing programmed mechanical “kaleidoscopes” as
substitutes for individual artistic process."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
