Comment on Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models
Vodulas@beehaw.org 3 weeks agopeople 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
Aren’t copyright laws awesome?
And still, they are suing them for migrating formats without authorization.
All hail Disney and the 150 year copyright term!
Oh, copyright is for sure fucked, but until we have UBI it is about all we have to potentially protect small artists
Is it protecting “small artists”, though?
Suing for copyright infringement, requires money, both for lawyers and proceedings.
Small artists don’t have that money. Large artists do, small ones don’t, so more often than not they end up watching as their copyright is being abused without being able to do anything about it.
To get any money, small artists generally sign off their rights, either directly to clients (work for hire), or to publishers… who do have the money to enforce the copyright, but pay peanuts to the artist… when they even pay anything. A typical publishing contract has an advance payment, a marketing provision… then any copyright payments go first to pay off the “investment” by the publisher, and only then they give a certain (rather small) percentage to the artist. Small artists rarely reach the payment threshold.
Best case scenario, small artists get defended by default by some “artists, editors, and publishers” association… which is like putting wolves in charge of sheep. The associations routinely charge for copyrighted material usage… then don’t know whom to pay out, because not every small artist is a member, so they just pocket it, often using it to subsidize publishers.
It can, and has helped people when their art is stolen by smaller entities. But for sure when it is the big companies doing the stealing it does not do a lot. I never said copyright is good, and abolishing it is better, but how far are we from doing that? This is US centric, but it would require our government to not be so heavily influenced by corporate money.
Zaleramancer@beehaw.org 3 weeks 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.
Vodulas@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
Totally fair.