DB 🌱💦@dbattistella@mstdn.ca

Anthropic spent billions of dollars to slice the spines off millions of books, including very rare ones.

AI companies are purchasing large quantities of used and rare books and scanning their contents to train LLMs. They then turn the originals to pulp.

The sum of human thought, digitized and shredded. Every book that gets scanned disappears from the physical world permanently.

Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.

#AI #Books #Culture #Civilization #Tech #LLMs

ALT
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Alexey Skobkin@skobkin@gts.skobk.in

Replying to @⁨dbattistella@mstdn.ca⁩

@dbattistella

Every book that gets scanned disappears from the physical world permanently

How exactly does that work? Is this some kind of black hole information paradox?

Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.

This reductive framing shows either a misunderstanding of the issue or an attempt to distort information for the purpose of manipulation (propaganda).

In specific cases like when the book is the last of it's kind and won't be released as a part of a dataset later I can agree that it's sad though.

Alexey Skobkin@skobkin@gts.skobk.in
edited

Replying to @⁨joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech⁩

@joepie91 Yes, they do.

But the problem is not only in Anthropic because they just want to destroy our books. They legally can't do anything about it because it's exactly the destruction of the book when transferring it's content from physical to digital which allows to consider that a fair use.

Instead, it was a 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.

Here's the US district court decision about that, I took quotes from it:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.434709/gov.uscourts.cand.434709.231.0_4.pdf

So to me this is not as tragic as it's being framed. But I'd personally prefer to:

  • Have a copyright reform.
  • Have a requirement that if the company consumes the last copy of some book, they'd be required to provide it's digital version to the public.  Or just provide all books to these companies for free in exchange of producing high quality digital copies for public use.

I say that because most people in the world don't have access to those books described as rare anyway. Someone from big US city being able to read them in the library isn't much better to me than giving it to Anthropic 🤷

@dbattistella