Jenni Evans

You may remember an article in a South African newspaper [I don't remember which one, but they did interview me then] a few months back reporting that my books and those of Nadine Gordimer were used to train ChatGPT without our permission. Some of you who are bo-tsebanyane (know-it-all) sneered when I posted that we were going to sue for compensation. Well, we did sue and there was a case - what they call class-action in the USA - called Bartz v. Anthropic which we [fellow writers whose books were used without our permission] won. I received an email from my agents in London which partly reads: "There was a major copyright lawsuit in the US brought by authors against AI company Anthropic for using books without permission to train large language models. A settlement agreement was preliminarily approved in September 2025. The settlement would see authors whose US publications have been used by the company to train AI-models receive a share of $1.5bn." Whereas the newspaper article had only mentioned Ways of Dying, it turns out that six of my novels were used to train AI and I was none the wiser: The Heart of Redness, The Madonna of Excelsior, The Whale Caller, She Plays with the Darkness, Sometimes there is a Void. Don't be deceived by the billions. They are not all coming to me. They are shared by many writers in the USA. But at least, however little, I will be compensated for each of the books that were used. Damn! I didn't know of my contribution in the development of AI. But the only reason I am telling you this story is to ask the question: what about our South African writers? You can't tell me that these AI developers only used books published in the USA. Does South African law allow South African-based writers to fight for their intellectual property rights in South African courts? Or does the so-called "fair use" doctrine leave them out in the cold from enjoying the fruits of their labour? Find out from those who know.