This Week’s Highlights:
A judge finally approved Anthropic’s settlement with writers this week, establishing the price of a book ingested by AI: it’s roughly $3,000 a book, the going rate under the $1.5 billion Anthropic copyright settlement (AP). Uh huh. I guess $3 is something, when you didn’t expect to see the money or if your book didn’t sell all that well. BUT – it establishes a baseline rate for what AI scrapers took. Not enough? We won’t know for a few more years. Meanwhile, AI-generated biographies of real people are piling up on Amazon by the thousands (The New York Times). How bizarre to read your life as authored by machine.
But watch what audiences did with their own money. LA theaters raced to resurrect the nearly lost craft of 70mm projection for Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey (Los Angeles Times). Publishers competed over who could make the most lavish foil-stamped edition of Homer (The New York Times). British fanzines are suddenly surging in popularity (The Guardian), and Gen Z is buying up 20-year-old digital cameras (NPR) because they’re cool. When AI abundance costs nothing, provenance and craft become what people pay for. A market forming?
Trump, meanwhile, is testing a different theory of cultural value, ordering warning signs outside the Smithsonian (Washington Post). And a national book-ban bill now in both houses of Congress (Publishers Weekly). Government is shifting from funding culture to adjudicating (and sometimes outlawing) it.
All this week’s stories below, organized by topic.
