Worth Noting: Two Small Wins in the Multi-Front War on Unfettered Artificial Intelligence

by | Sep 8, 2025 | Worth Noting

SEPTEMBER 2025 – It’s easy to still be awed by Nvidia’s chips and Open AI’s ChatGPT but the overall role of Artificial Intelligence – in our free society, or any other – remains a mystery.  After all AI bots today engage in ongoing site scraping – simply stealing the work or real people – and AI’s promotors argue that that’s “fair use” and it’s all A-OK.

Well, two reports in the last week at least slow the momentum of AI’s unfettered, uncontrolled dominance. In the first, a company that operates the Claude AI bot settled a class-action suit that included book authors as plaintiffs. The settlement? $1.5 billion. An amount that, depending on whom you talk to, is a meaningful reward or a drop in the bucket.

Still, the settlement is the first of its kind involving a developer of AI bots – and it augurs well for other in-the-pipeline litigation like the NYT suits against Open AI. (Yes, the comedian Sarah Silverman had a setback in June in her suit against Meta, but that hardly settles things.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/09/05/anthropic-book-authors-copyright-settlement

The comment board attached to the above link didn’t come down firmly – one way or another – on whether “content creators” have won anything. Among the comments:
I think this will be the first of many legal actions in AI copyright infringements. Against individuals and AI driven publishers.
Stop with the settlements already. This company should have been abolished for what it did. Now nothing but a bunch of money changes hands. They’ll do it again. We really don’t have a system of justice.
This is a big deal. AI shares the wealth with underlying content.
Meanwhile, in a second development, The Washington Post reported that the publishers Business Insider and Wired took down articles that were purportedly written by AI.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/09/06/fake-bylines-ai-business-insider/
But even that report didn’t exactly get to the bottom of who pushed the buttons that made those AI articles. The article cites a “Margeaux Blanchard” as the originator – but a week earlier (at least based on the posted dateline) Medium.com posted an article by someone named Andrew Frelon, who describes himself as “Super Hacker”, and who claimed to be “Margeauz Blanchard.”
The medium.com link includes an obviously AI-generated photo of an attractive youngish woman – supposedly “Margeaux.”
“Frelon” or whoever it is wrote:
“…the real story here that nobody has talked about — because they did not understand the full sweep of the operation — is not that a single node named Margaux Blanchard was exposed, but that so many countless others were not. Hundreds of other autonomous AI agents are still active, filing stories, shaping coverage, and bending narratives every day. And that’s just in our system — nevermind others that exist outside our control (and there are many). You may have edited them, quoted them, or even amplified them on social media without realizing it. The line between human and machine contribution is already blurring, and the difference will soon become irrelevant. News media and human journalists will have no choice but to adapt, or die out.”
That last sentence by Frelon or whoever he is is nonsense – a real writer writes it, and machine makes it. Nothing blurry about it.  It’s a distinction that the stock-option-owning AI engineers and coders and developers would rather you not believe.