Comment by lenkite | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lenkite | Hacker News Reader

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Evidence ? Good lord, how about the US district court of justice ? Anthropic physically destroyed millions of books after scanning them - are you really, truly questioning that ?

Here is what was signed by Judge Alsup at https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califo...

> Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase MILLIONS of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals.

Dismissing the above as "dead inventory" is atrocious reasoning. The more obscure/low-circulation books are arguably MORE valuable as training material because they contain information that is less likely to be duplicated across the ordinary web.

And 404 Media's reporting wasn't merely based on a bookseller's terminology of your "dead inventory". There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-que...

They are destroying books that they bought. It should not be controversial that part of ownership is decided how to dispose of the owned object.

But nothing you're citing adds up to "destroying the foundations of civilization". What we have instead is companies that are now paying to get copies of creative works (isn't this what everyone is complaining about with all the "theft" rhetoric?) so they can use them for training.

When they discuss scanning all the books in the world, they are not talking about every copy, since that makes no sense. They want one of each.

So, in the end, this all sounds like some breathless emotional take because large companies are buying copies of books and using them to train AI and throwing them away. They are probably destroying fewer books than the publishing houses do over the same time period.

This is like the water discussion: people with no understanding of agriculture (or publishing) hear a sound-bite about what AI is doing, and, with little-to-no context, devolve into a panic about it.

Again: cite real harm. What books aren't available? What knowledge was destroyed? There are real concerns about AI, but this whole discussion is a distraction.

> They are destroying books that they bought. It should not be controversial that part of ownership is decided how to dispose of the owned object.

By your reasoning, if I could afford to buy every surviving painting by Van Gogh and Rembrandt and I burned them in a bon fire I wouldn't be taking anything from human culture and nobody should care at all about what I do with my belongings.

Destroying something that is rare or one of a kind and valuable does matter. Doing it so that you can exclusively profit off of charging people for software that regurgitates lossy and error filled versions of what was lost makes it even worse.

More so because their digital copy increases in value because of the destruction.

Only in a world where we can't make new copies, which does not seem to be this world.

In your scenario, the bug is letting someone control all of that in a private collection. But that scenario is completely divorced from what is actually happening, so I don't think it's worth discussing too deeply here.

If you actually object to the concept that people that own a physical object get to decide how to dispose of it, that would be an interesting discussion to have because it would fly in the face of property ownership rights.

Why such a blinkered argument, I own the soda can I just drank but it is still, arguably, wrong of me to chuck it in the trash instead of the recycle bin. Yes, you have the "right" to dispose of things you own but there's more to what's right than that. There's human decency, consideration, awareness of the environment, the spirit of the laws, cases the laws were not designed for in mind etc.

Like, tell your mother or HS teacher you decided not to recycle because you own your trash. See how well that clever argument goes.

if the recyclers really think the aluminum in that can is valuable, theyll fush it out if the garbage or the dump to get it.

putting that sorting and disposal on end customers was a business way of offloading their making single use trash problems on somebody else.

point any blame for cans in the trash where it belongs - can makers

you should indeed be able to, but maybe buying art shouldn't be allowed at all, with people only being allowed digital recreations.

why do you need more than a picture of the rembrandt? there's so much good artwork easily available that the rembrandt is only worth money because hoity toity people want to store their money in it and in the future sell it again

Many were out of print or were used copies, so they weren't books you could simply order new from a publisher. They are out of print. Anthropic deliberately sourced large quantities through used-book sellers such as Better World Books and World of Books and destroyed the physical copies after scanning them.

If you find this a "breathless emotional take", then I don't even know what to say. Nothing will meet your "evidence" criteria to dislodge your fervent fawning and support for destruction carried out by AI corporations.

> There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world"

If I do something destructive to my copy of Accelerate -- feed it through a scanner, leave it where the munchkin can reach, whatever -- that does nothing to deprive you of your copy. Books are funny like that; there tend to be lots of identical ones.

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