Comment on Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models

Zaleramancer@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• Vodulas@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  people got really upset with them throwing away books that had multiple reprintings and were in awful condition.

  That is not what is going on here, though. They bought millions of dollars of new books in order to train AI and used destructive scanning instead of non-destructive methods. It is a huge waste of resources. They could have used a non-destructive method then donated the books. But like everything involved in current AI, they chose the most wasteful method

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  • jarfil@beehaw.org ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Aren’t copyright laws awesome?

    • Buy digital copy… no you can’t, you can only license one
    • Buy physical book, now you have a copy
    • Want a digital copy? No you can’t, copyright forbids it…
    • …unless you destroy the physical copy in the process, then it’s only a format migration

    And still, they are suing them for migrating formats without authorization.

    All hail Disney and the 150 year copyright term!

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    • Vodulas@beehaw.org ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Oh, copyright is for sure fucked, but until we have UBI it is about all we have to potentially protect small artists

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  • Zaleramancer@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Yeah, see, I am on your side but the focus on “destroying books is bad,” is kind of irrelevant to the actual harm being done.

    It’s that they’re devouring the contents of people’s brains for the ability to replace them that’s concerning. If they chose to do this in a completely different way that preserved the books, I would not say it changes the moral valence of their actions.

    By centering the argument on the destruction of the books, it shifts it away from the actual concern.

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    • Vodulas@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Totally fair.

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