Jennifer Prokop

AI startup Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5bn to settle book piracy lawsuit Settlement could be pivotal after authors claimed company took pirated copies of their work to train chatbots

It is particularly fucked for people like Roose to be doing lazy stunts like this when they exclusively a product created by a company that is VERIFIABLY creating outputs based on work that was an act of gross, slimy mass theft (by a company that has done a weirdly good job of hiding its slime)

This is really where shockingly uncritical tech advocates like Kevin Roose are being key-jangled by the tech companies.

You could do the same test for real vs fake rolexs on the general population, and similarly fail to acknowledge the power of the fake comes from copying the real

LITERALLY the exact search that prompted my post.

I sometimes worry that too many people think being a good critic means being a self-righteous dick about every little thing and I think far too many miss the point that you can't critique anything if you don't know how to love something.

a petty small grievance I have is that if you google a book or book series, it should come up first in search results, even if they happen to have made a TV show or movie out of it.

Reader Preferences And How "I Before She" is Changing the Romance Genre via @slate.com with quotes from @jenreadsromance.bsky.social:

raforall.blogspot.com/2026/03/read...

Even though I'm an economist, I wish there was more focus on the human suffering from this war and less focus on the economic consequences. Hundreds of little girls are dead, and we're worried about oil prices.

WNBA player Brittney Sykes holding a "pay the players sign" with Angel Reese in the background, i'll be honest, not the best picture of her, but you can tell she is in total agreement, and that's what matters.

A grim and depressing March 10 to all who celebrate. I know things can get done at the last minute, but feels bad.

Pay the players!!!!! #wnba

They spent your tax money on killing children. I think it's worth us spending our tax money prosecuting and punishing them all. No one will argue against it. It is a popular stance. Don't be a pussy. Stand up for those girls who were killed in our name.

doing the work!

I felt okay OTHER than the hot baseball.

the first shingles shot KNOCKED ME OUT. like, what the fuck, it was like having a hot baseball under my arm.

three minutes and thirteen seconds of a single 70° bike ride along the lake: CHICAGO IS THE GREATEST CITY CONCEIVED BY MAN. DANIEL BURNHAM WAITED 70 YEARS FOR ROBERT MOSES TO DIE TO BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF HIM IN THE AFTERLIFE

Here is a screen grab from the Boyton Water Chute cut. 62nd & Drexel, built in 1894 and relocated around 1900. It's recognized as the first true 'amusement park' in the US.

LOL

What's the latest on the WNBA CBA negotiations?

it scares me to think that big tech/big AI's primary target demographic is kids

a man in a white shirt and tie is sitting in front of a window with blinds on it ALT: a man in a white shirt and tie is sitting in front of a window with blinds on it

I hate that every interaction I have as a consumer turns me a little bit more into this guy.

what board meeting? no one would schedule a board meeting on a day like today!

Oh yeah, that book is so great. That tense shift does so much work.

I could probably switch between first past and third past no problem. but that kind of split would be difficult for me, too.

My hot writing take about tense and POV is stop blaming YA for why some adult romance readers are demanding first person POV. Deal with your own readers. Stop using YA as a cudgel for everything you think is wrong with adult books.

We know a lot is going on right now, but we just realized that:

cabinet/board/panel = things made of wood

cabinet/board/panel = terms for organizations

Is there a "present tense or bust" reader they were trying to please? was it for the author, who just really loves that writing style even when it doesn't match the story they wanted to tell? I literally do not know.

I read a book this weekend (or attempted to) that made a series of really bizarre choices to keep the book in present, and the whole thing would have been so much better in first past. why tie yourself up into a pretzel for a narrative style that won't work? who is that for?

I feel the same way, tbh. Present tense is so hard to do well, and yet it really has become a default, so much so that writers use it in ways that make no sense for the story.

same, same.

can't help but notice whose losses are expressed in dollars and whose losses are expressed in lives

I think he pitched the article himself from what it sounded, just was genuinely like "what's going on here." I bet no one from trad would talk to him. No one's going to admit: yes, we are forcing authors to cater to this type of reader. but it's happening.

I had a good conversation with him even tho that's not coming thru. But I will take this brand of ignorance based in curiosity over the reporter from the NYT who wrote that "look at these dummies, too dumb to recognize AI slop books" piece with such venom.

w/romance reporting, the bar is low.