Signs installed earlier this month in national parks across the country asking visitors to share feedback on “any signs or other information that are negative about past or living Americans” are eliciting all sorts of reactions. But comments viewed by NPR don’t provide the requested feedback.

Visitors to the Presidio of San Francisco, a National Historic Landmark and former military garrison with a complex history seemed unimpressed by the small black-and-white sign placed on a coffee table at roughly shin-level near the Presidio’s welcome center on a recent morning.

“The point of going to a park is to enjoy nature, not to whistleblow something that casts the American people in a bad light,” said Evan Sutterfield, a San Francisco school teacher enjoying a day out on his summer break.

“I think you need to tell the whole story,” said Russ Harwell, visiting from Charlotte, N.C. “If you’re gonna write it out of history, then you’re doomed to repeat it.”

Linda Mosinian from Milwaukee, Wis. added: “I think this is a waste of time.” 

‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History’

The signs, which invite people to send comments anonymously using a QR code, phone number, email or web address, have appeared in response to an executive order President Trump issued in March titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It specifically calls for the removal of content from monuments and properties within the Department of the Interior that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living.”

In a statement to NPR, the Department of the Interior said: “The effort ensures public lands reflect an accurate portrayal of American history and heritage.”

NPR reviewed dozens of comments submitted from June 4 to 12 regarding signs placed in parks across the country. According to The Coalition to Protect America’s Parks, a multi-page PDF containing these comments was leaked by a national park employee who took screenshots of the comments pages on their computer and then shared the PDF with parks advocacy groups.

None of the submitted comments suggest the parks need to change their depictions of people or history.

Some are supportive. “The park rangers and volunteers go above and beyond to tell the full American story,” stated a comment about Catoctin Mountain Park in Maryland.

Others say national parks should reflect even more of the country’s difficult history. “Need more history on how black and indigenous people have been exploited,” one comment stated.

Differing opinions

That’s not to say all visitors are happy about the historical information shared at parks.

Department of the Interior spokesperson J. Elizabeth Peace said after Trump issued the executive order — but before the signs went up — her department had already started receiving feedback from national park visitors via the department’s email address.

Peace said one example relates to Capitol Reef National Park in Utah, where a visitor reported that a souvenir postcard mislabeled a nearby landmark and appeared to copy text from Wikipedia without attribution.

Another came from a visitor concerned about a video on the website of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., which inaccurately stated George Washington ended his inaugural oath with a phrase historians widely agree lacks definitive sourcing.

The phrase in question was “So help me God.”

Neither of these comments related to Trump’s executive order about content that, “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living.” But Peace said they were nevertheless useful.

“Both examples provided were reviewed by the National Park Service and appropriate corrective or clarifying action was taken,” Peace said. “These examples underscore the value of public feedback in helping us maintain historical accuracy across our sites and materials.”

Accuracy challenges

Accuracy isn’t a given, because feedback can be submitted through a general website or email address accessible from anywhere in the world.

“What would stop somebody with an agenda from posting fake comments?” said Clara Wooden, a member of the board of The Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks. “People at both ends of the ideological spectrum can game the system without even setting foot in a national park.”

In response to these concerns, the Department of the Interior’s Peace told NPR comments are individually reviewed before being routed to appropriate subject matter experts for further evaluation and validation. “This manual review process helps ensure that the feedback we work with is both relevant and credible,” she said.

Jeff Bezos, Lauren Sanchez
Smoochin’ Like the World Is Watching!!!💋
Rehearsal, Here We Come!!!

Published June 26, 2025 11:28 AM PDT

AI companies could have the legal right to train their large language models on copyrighted works — as long as they obtain copies of those works legally.

That’s the upshot of a first-of-its-kind ruling by a federal judge in San Francisco on Monday in an ongoing copyright infringement case that pits a group of authors against a major AI company.

The ruling is significant because it represents the first substantive decision on how fair use applies to generative AI systems.

Fair use doctrine enables copyrighted works to be used by third parties without the copyright holder’s consent in some circumstances such as illustrating a point in a news article. Claims of fair use are commonly invoked by AI companies trying to make the case for the use of copyrighted works to train their generative AI models. But authors and other creative industry plaintiffs have been pushing back with a slew of lawsuits.

Authors take on Anthropic

In their 2024 class action lawsuit, authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson alleged Anthropic AI used the contents of millions of digitized copyrighted books to train the large language models behind their chatbot, Claude, including at least two works by each plaintiff. The company also bought some hard copy books and scanned them before ingesting them into its model.

“Rather than obtaining permission and paying a fair price for the creations it exploits, Anthropic pirated them,” the authors’ complaint states.

In Monday’s order, Senior U.S. District Judge William Alsup supported Anthropic’s argument, stating the company’s use of books by the plaintiffs to train their AI model was acceptable.

“The training use was a fair use,” he wrote. “The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative.”

The judge said the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic could also be considered fair use, “because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies.”

However, Alsup also acknowledged that not all books were paid for. He wrote Anthropic “downloaded for free millions of copyrighted books in digital form from pirate sites on the internet” as part of its effort “to amass a central library of ‘all the books in the world’ to retain ‘forever,.’”

Alsup did not approve of Anthropic’s view “that the pirated library copies must be treated as training copies,” and is allowing the authors’ piracy complaint to proceed to trial.

“We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory (including for willfulness),” Alsup stated.

Bifurcated responses

Alsup’s bifurcated decision led to similarly divided responses from those involved in the case and industry stakeholders.

In a statement to NPR, Anthropic praised the judge’s recognition that using works to train large language models was “transformative — spectacularly so.” The company added: “Consistent with copyright’s purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress, Anthropic’s large language models are trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them, but to turn a hard corner and create something different.”

However, Anthropic also said it disagrees with the court’s decision to proceed with a trial.

“We believe it’s clear that we acquired books for one purpose only — building large language models — and the court clearly held that use was fair,” the company stated.

A member of the plaintiffs’ legal team declined to speak publicly about the decision.

The Authors’ Guild, a major professional writers’ advocacy group, did share a statement: “We disagree with the decision that using pirated or scanned books for training large language models is fair use,” the statement said.

In an interview with NPR, the guild’s CEO, Mary Rasenberger, added that authors need not be too concerned with the ruling.

 ”The impact of this decision for book authors is actually quite good,” Rasenberger said. “The judge understood the outrageous piracy. And that comes with statutory damages for intentional copyright infringement, which are quite high per book.”

According to the Copyright Alliance, U.S. copyright law states willful copyright infringement can lead to statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work. The ruling states Anthropic pirated more than 7 million copies of books. So the damages resulting from the upcoming trial could be huge.

The part of the case focused on Anthropic’s liability for using pirated works is scheduled to go to trial in December.

Other cases and a new ruling

Similar lawsuits have been brought by other prominent authors. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz and the comedian Sarah Silverman are involved in ongoing cases against AI players.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria ruled in favor of Meta in one of those cases. A copyright infringement lawsuit was brought by 13 authors including Richard Kadrey and Silverman. They sued Meta for allegedly using pirated copies of their novels to train LLaMA. Meta claimed fair use and won because the authors failed to present evidence that Meta’s use of their books impacted the market for their original work. However, the judge said the ruling applies only to the specific works included in the lawsuit and that in future cases, authors making similar claims could win if they make a stronger case.

“ These rulings are going to help tech companies and copyright holders to see where judges and courts are likely to go in the future,” said Ray Seilie, a lawyer based in Los Angeles with the firm Kinsella Holley Iser Kump Steinsapir, who focuses on AI and creativity. He is not involved with this particular case.

“ I think they can be seen as a victory for the AI community writ large because they create a precedent suggesting that AI companies can use legally-obtained material to train their models,” Seilie said.

But he said this doesn’t mean AI companies can immediately go out and scan whatever books they buy with impunity, since the rulings are likely to be appealed and the cases could potentially wind up before the Supreme Court.

“ Everything could change,” Seilie said.