> Authors? Not so much. Losing your book to AI for a one time $3000 settlement feels like a bad deal to me.

AFAIK it's even worse as this settlement is only about downloading pirated copies of the books. IIRC the training itself was deemed fair use.

Well things are worse in the sense that a different ruling feels really bad for them.

But it means that this case is getting them thousands of dollars instead of one or two purchases, which is a pretty good outcome.