Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
https://www.bundesarchiv.de/en/stasi-records-archive/the-rec...
It's set in 2025.
Oh boy. The more I learn about how genAI companies work, the more detestable they appear to be.
In an era where people are starting to calculate the environmental impact of the jobs they run on the cloud and start to optimize it, adding that much load on recycling system is not a wise choice, but only a selfish one.
Meta didn't have to do any of this. They just used The Pile.
The physical stuff is straightforward. Buy books from bulk sellers, rip off everything and put them into off-the-self rigs for digitization. It's straightforward, directly scalable, can use any book, and your main issue is format shifting, which anthropic successfully argued here. No DRM, you buy exactly the books you need, and every book is processed exactly the same way.
If you try to buy ebooks, you get wrapped up in onerous licensing terms about copying, and how you're able to use them, how long you're able to access them, and so on. Many books won't even be available (or can only be licensed alongside a bunch of others) and you have to deal with DRM you can't strip without creating additional copyright issues.
We've somehow created a world where physical objects are more free than bits.
To be honest, I probably wouldn't have even commented on it if it were the only bad thing these companies do.
> Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. The judge compared the process to "conserv[ing] space" through format conversion and found it transformative.
Very laws that the publishing industry has lobbied so heavily to make so strict are the reasons for this behavior.
That doesn't mean I support everything that people have a right to do with their property.
No, my issue is with the companies that do this. The law doesn't enter into it. Just because a thing is legal doesn't mean it's OK.
Most well-educated persons have read far fewer books yet are presumably more intelligent than any LLM. This is a hint toward solving the problem of AI: the industry would do well to pay attention to that hint.
In other words, the industry should concentrate on creating an AI that has a far more limited corpus. Of course, maybe they are doing so but not telling anyone about it. I certainly wouldn't reveal my best ideas. At the same time one must remember that, only a few centuries ago, people learned to read English by studying the King James version of the Old Testament, a single book [not to say that a lot of work didn't go into that particular text: it really is a work of art in the English language].
Perhaps the AI industry must maintain a illusion for the unwashed masses (and especially investors) that each generation of LLM AI must always be bigger to reach AGI, whereas the truth is that some guy in his study will find the key that ties LLMs to human intelligence and will, any day, render the entire industry obsolete.
BUT... here's the only line in that whole article that really matters, because this is a headline meant to create an impression that isn't corrected for quite a while.
> The court documents don't indicate that any rare books were destroyed in this process—Anthropic purchased its books in bulk from major retailers
Books are routinely pulped and recycled, they aren't holy, and if they aren't rare then frankly who cares what techniques they use to scan them? The issue is whether or not "AI" learning represents fair use, which the courts so far have ruled that it does.
Does it matter? It's waste at the end of the day. Instead they could have bought e-books. Just because we can recycle paper, it doesn't mean we have the luxury to create waste as we see fit, esp. when climate change became this severe.
> which the courts so far have ruled that it does.
Any concrete cases you can cite?
From [0], for example, while the course said that the authors failed to argue their case, the second observation is complete opposite of what you said. Citing the article directly:
Opinion suggests AI models do generally violate law.
[0]: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/meta-beats-copyrigh...
Rubbish.
More likely they are taking a waste stream of books and reusing and possibly even recycling.
Few people want old books, and many people that have books are throwing them out or donating them. I don't think I know anybody under 30 with a bookshelf of books they obviously intend to keep for life. Bookshelves used to be an elite status symbol, now I often see them as image rather than reference (e.g. part off backdrop behind influencer vid).
It is likely they didn't destroy much of value, since they will have minimized their purchasing costs. Modern DRM is not helping.
As someone who finds the act objectionable, I actually do think this is an important point. Destroying commodity books in this way is objectionable. Destroying precious books in this way would be abominable.
Some large percentage of physical books really aren't a precious commodity. They may be precious to you as an individual but chances are no-one else is going to be that bothered. For example, a second hand book wholesaler I just found with a quick google will sell you pallets of books for 25c/book which would only go down as your purchase size went up. If they don't sell then it seems pretty likely those books are going to get pulped anyway.
If they were buying the books new and then essentially pulping them after scanning that does feel wasteful, but if they were buying in bulk from a second hand wholesaler then Im kinda glad the content of those books is going into something useful before they get pulped.
1. The sheer scale - millions of books.
2. The sheer destruction - millions of books.
3. Judge declaring it fair use.
4. How could they be not noticed by people around? is the office location isolated
A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books
The book ‘Empire of AI’ by Karen Hao is recomended.