Odd Week, That

So apparently, Anthropic's AI used my collection, Live Nude Aliens and Other Stories, to train itself. Granted, it falls among a lot of texts, but it's an odd sort of compliment and an affront. In an American lawsuit, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion in damages to authors whose books they scraped from pirating sites for the purpose of training their generative. The settlement only applies to American authors, but a Canadian lawsuit may follow. My sister Jo (whose book Just Gone was also among those scraped, along with one of her academic papers) and I have both filed our names, in the event of a Canadian settlement coming through within our lifetime.

The American settlement (which would amount, reportedly, to about $3,000.00 for each book used) has already encountered obstructions.

And then there was my passing encounter with "Canada's second-greatest rapper," my online entanglement with a celebrated best-selling

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^{I could go crazy on a night like tonight}

^{When summer's beginning to give up her fight}

 

 

 

 

September is both an end and a beginning

the gradual change of seasons

 

While others see a descent into winter, 

I have always embraced the return to school,

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Smash The Frames as a slogan would be a call back to the early industrial revolution, that where labour organised against the industrialists and factory owners. As a form of industrial action and protest called wrecking. Workers would smash the frames that made machine made fabrics (Hobsbawm,1952) In the modern context I would suggest such a slogan would apply to anti AI and big tech corporations. Frames in this context is taken to mean mainframes of computers.

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