Anthropic’s secret plan to ‘destructively scan every book in the world’

Two things being overlooked here. First, buying and scanning books for AI training was judged legal, not illegal, according to the article.

Second, destructive scanning is a cool and useful service. I've used it myself to turn old books into PDFs. And this isn't Alexandria; these are all books for which many copies exist.

https://archive.ph/N0Ead

Alexandria all over again.

Is there any (major) AI-company that is not a total douchebag? The greed on display combined with a total absence of any kind of moral compass is sickening.

The conception that books are precious is an artifact of history.

Of course rare historical volumes are precious, but stuff you can buy new right now or that exists in the tens of thousands of copies? No.