After Anthropic wholesale pirated millions of books, and got only a slap on the wrist and no jail time, and Meta did almost the same, I've decided that "Anna's" plus used physical books plus printed new books are the right combination.
I guess it depends by your definition of "worse", the process of buying books and destroying them was considered "transformative" enough to be considered legal, while Anthropic later did piracy and kind of legally undermined the whole book scanning operation.
It's kinda poetic that in the entire process, authors get screwed thrice. First, by the publishers and retailers, who keep 80% of the revenue. Then, by the hacker culture that enables widespread, institutionalized book piracy for the sake of "information wanting to be free". And finally, by the same hacker culture gone corporate, where "grown-up" geeks conclude that, since we already have all these pirated works out there, what's the harm of training LLMs on that.
Music is quite similar, and I've actually seen piracy justified by saying that "eh, the musicians are screwed either way". And of course, that piracy enabled suno.ai, which is now making sure that the musicians are really screwed.
Too true, and with 1000's of new books added daily, new authors are lost in the noise. Writing is a lifestyle choice and a hobby, you will need to be very lucky, have a strong following or be pushed by a big publishing house to make any money from it, even successful indie authors will earn in a year what a good programmer earns in a day.
