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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6445 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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Anthropic is destroying old books to build AI.

This is an old story that has been picking up on twitter this week. Here's the Washington Post from January:

Inside an AI start-up’s plan to scan and dispose of millions of books

In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document unsealed in legal filings last week said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Within about a year, according to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed more knowledge into the AI models behind products such as its popular chatbot, Claude.

It turns out that destroying old books is one of the cheapest ways to build an AI dataset. Old books are well-structured texts and (generally) contain quality information; digital archives incur tremendous legal fees and liabilities; copyright risks, in fact, are unsettled and could threaten the entire AI buildout. There's no such problem with maintaining a private library of books: the problem is how to scan them. Physical books have an awkward, blocky shape if your goal is to lay them flat on a reader and extract all the text. The simplest solution is to rip the spine out, lay the pages flat, and run them through a scanner:

The document describes how the scanning company’s “hydraulic powered cutting machine” would “neatly cut” books, whose pages would later be “scanned on high speed, high quality, production level scanners.” Finally, it notes, the scanning company will “schedule with the recycling company to pick up the completed books.”

"Completed books" is such an interesting euphemism, isn't it? You cut the books "neatly," let's not elaborate on that too much, scan them on "high speed, high quality" scanners, narrative detail, narrative detail, then you "schedule with the recycling company". For "the completed books". It's kind of gorgeous.

Ars Technica goes into other details in their article from June 2025, here:

Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models

The 32-page legal decision tells the story of how, in February 2024, the company hired Tom Turvey, the former head of partnerships for the Google Books book-scanning project, and tasked him with obtaining “all the books in the world.” The strategic hire appears to have been designed to replicate Google’s legally successful book digitization approach—the same scanning operation that survived copyright challenges and established key fair use precedents.

So Anthropic is really just copying what Google did before, except that Google didn't have to "schedule" the "completed books":

While destructive scanning is a common practice among some book digitizing operations, Anthropic’s approach was somewhat unusual due to its documented massive scale. By contrast, the Google Books project largely used a patented non-destructive camera process to scan millions of books borrowed from libraries and later returned. For Anthropic, the faster speed and lower cost of the destructive process appears to have trumped any need for preserving the physical books themselves, hinting at the need for a cheap and easy solution in a highly competitive industry.

But it was a good deal for Anthropic nonetheless. Destroying books saved them from billions in copyright disputes:

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. Had Anthropic stuck to this approach from the beginning, it might have achieved the first legally sanctioned case of AI fair use. Instead, the company’s earlier piracy undermined its position.

Before continuing, I would like to introduce here one other critical detail I will come back to later:

The court documents don’t indicate that any rare books were destroyed in this process—Anthropic purchased its books in bulk from major retailers—but archivists long ago established other ways to extract information from paper. For example, The Internet Archive pioneered non-destructive book scanning methods that preserve physical volumes while creating digital copies. And earlier this month, OpenAI and Microsoft announced they’re working with Harvard’s libraries to train AI models on nearly 1 million public domain books dating back to the 15th century—fully digitized but preserved to live another day.

So even though Anthropic didn't have to destroy their books, at least they apparently haven't destroyed anything truly rare.

This old story has been all over my twitter this week with a spate of discussion. Maybe this is a clever marketing ploy by Big Elon, because when I went searching for a recent article to corroborate this post I found this PR puff piece from today:

Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will preserve rare books instead of destroying them for AI training

Elon Musk has taken a pointed swipe at Anthropic’s controversial book-scanning methods, saying SpaceXAI will preserve rare volumes rather than damage them while preparing training material for artificial intelligence systems. His comments arrive as questions deepen over how AI companies acquire, digitise and use books to build increasingly powerful models.

There you have it: Anthropic destroyed millions of books, one of the greatest evils we can imagine, to save a few bucks. And now that the public has been informed the great AI companies are going to behave much more responsibly and treasure our collective heritage. Happy, happy!

I would now like to argue that Anthropic was right.

I know that this strikes many as a priori evil. Destroying books for many evokes (or is even the same as) book-burning. And many consider destroying books to be one of the greatest evils imaginable.

So I would like to start by asserting that, before Anthropic destroyed these books, they were basically worthless.

I think people are living in a fantasy. These unread books are not sitting in a warehouse vault somewhere, pristine, untouched, waiting for their future destiny forever home. A wise scholar is not going to stumble across these books in a stony brook and find exactly the wisdom he was seeking. Your future wife is not a perfect passive virgin waiting for you to find her, however long that takes. No, it doesn't work like that. These books are constantly decaying. Everything is constantly decaying. Everything is constantly being destroyed.

By destroying books Anthropic put them to a better use. Destruction is, in fact, the only way anything is ever created.

The Odyssey is current now because of Nolan's latest film. The Odyssey is a beautiful poem that reached us across thousands of years of preservation. One imagines Orthodox monks painstakingly copying everything by hand, vellum and inkwells, Gregorian chants and prayers. It's beautiful. But the less-remembered half is that there were other poems in the Epic Cycle besides The Odyssey (and The Iliad) that did not make it to us. Another six poems are lost. Why? Because readers found them boring. They were not, apparently, beautiful. At least, nobody found them important enough to dedicate their life to saving them. They were never burned or actively destroyed. They just decayed and, though disuse, were lost.

That is the only way anything is ever saved. Art is either alive and part of a vital culture, or it is dead and decays. "Anything not saved will be lost."

And it is necessary to destroy in order to create. The world is choked up with lots of preserved junk. Museums are full of it. Forests burn when you let it pile up too high. Cultures stagnate when too many idols become sacred cows. And it is very easy to make it difficult to build. Every "historic neighborhood" designation and preserved building makes it more difficult to build new homes. Every regulation is an assertion that we would rather curtail some forms of life, that not everything is equal.

I love going to local rinky-dink museums, it's a guilty pleasure of mine, and you know what I invariably find when I go? Old books, lots of them, sitting behind glass shelves where no one is allowed to read them. It's a minor industry. You can go to Mount Vernon or Monticello or the Henry Ford house and everywhere you'll find old dirty books just sitting there. There are companies you can place orders to if you want to open your own old house museum. Books sit there rotting, decor, not used by anyone, nobody minds.

The balance, I think, is that the new has to justify itself as better than the old. It was wrong to destroy old Penn Station in New York, because what replaced it was far less beautiful. It was wrong to let Cleveland and Detroit rot and some of the most beautiful house neighborhoods in America go to grass. I think it was wrong to destroy all the Confederate Statues, because nobody erected a better set of heroes. I remember when ISIS rampaged through Syria and they destroyed the Assyrian Lions. For what, nothing beautiful, and for what.

But I don't think destruction is inherently bad. I think New York is beautiful, London is beautiful, the built environments surpass the natural landscape that preceded them. And I consider what Anthropic is doing to be inherently more worthwhile than a few million burned books, especially if they didn't even destroy anything rare.

There is a load-bearing thought I have been trying to get at that came to me from Loren Eiseley through John Donne -- I believe, forgive me, the reference is not in front of me as I write. It goes like this: "Nature is not all that natural." The world is not in a wild state of nature. I believe in Genesis, I think everything is like a garden, there is no default state of nature that precedes our intervention. Yellowstone is beautiful, it's "natural," but it's made more beautiful because we maintain it. We assert that Yellowstone is more beautiful than the oil pipelines we could build there instead. Tomatoes are beautiful to me, I assert the right to pluck weeds out of the garden, not everything is equal. I eat meat, I think my life is worth more than a cow's, however beautiful a heifer may be. I don't take this destruction casually either, I don't mean this to be glib, I think I have a responsibility to life up to the value of what has been destroyed to give me life. How could it be otherwise? I think any other answer is self-abnegation, the first step toward a kind of selfish selflessness that leads to a suicidal bend.

My argument is that it's right for Anthropic to burn books because they are creating something higher than what they've destroyed. This argument is not reciprocal. It would be wrong if what Anthropic was creating was worse. I think this is just what it means to be alive. This is Genesis, this is the Parable of the Talents, this is the basis of civilization.

In college we scanned some textbooks so we could share them and not buy them. We did it exactly this way, chop the spine off and put the entire thing through a scanner's automatic document feeder.

Lots of old books are thrift store trash, with near zero street value and plentiful availability of you looked for it. But nobody scans them because nobody cares. Nothing of value is lost if a fair condition book like this is destroyed

Of course I would love for all these books to get dumped on libgen or annas archive but that could be asking too much. It would be cool if ai labs clould get together and donate to a "charity" in a jurisdiction where copyright doesn't exist, that just happens to release big torrent dumps of all the books

This an interesting example, really.

If you buy or otherwise legally obtain a book, you have the right to destroy it. That seems uncontroversial. If you destroy it for a good purpose, that's obviously fine - this principle only seems to run into limits when it comes to extremely rare or valuable books, and it doesn't sound like any of those were involved here. To the extent that there's an ethical issue here, it's copyright. Do Anthropic have the right to use these texts in a way that they were presumably never intended for? Our principles around buying, copying, and destroying physical books seem like they assume that the book is singular. Buying a book, copying it, and then selling copies at scale is generally considered against copyright, and this seems closer to that.

Even so, the problem there is just AI companies illegally harvesting data, and we know they've been doing that for years. That's bad, but this is just the companies continuing to be bad in the way that we already knew. No additional condemnation seems merited.

On the other hand, this conjures up the image of a soulless AI company grinding up books to feed into the machine. That is a horrifying image. Never mind that books are very cheaply produced and regularly thrown out - they are proverbially valuable. Destroying books is immediately understood as a sign of evil in popular culture. What's more, destroying real cultural artifacts in order to dump them into a machine brings to mind the Apple 'Crush' ad. Even if not entirely rational, the image brings to mind every bit of fear and loathing and contempt that people have towards these technologies.

I admit that I feel that response. I hear this story about destroying the books to digitise them and in my gut, I feel outrage. It seems like a perfect symbol of how, not to mince words, evil this technology is, and what these corporations are doing. It is the kind of thing that you would expect to see a supervillain doing in a film or comic, so viscerally horrifying an image it is.

If I set that aside, I do stand by the first half of this post. Books are cheap, books are thrown out all the time, there's nothing wrong in buying a book and then using it for some constructive purpose that involves physically destroying it. The only problem here is the one that we've known about for ages. This should not change your opinion of Anthropic or of its bots either way.

But... man, as an image, it is practically designed to make the company look loathsome.

As long as they aren't destroying books that are actually rare then I genuinely can't imagine the thought process of someone who thinks about this for more than 10 seconds and doesn't come to the conclusion that this is fine. The worst thing I can think of it is that people have to go through this whole expensive and time consuming rigamarole just to get copies of books that almost certainly have all already be digitized. Almost all of these books went from a digital format to a printed form and were reconverted to a digital format, it's absurd to me that people get worked up about this process on some kind of moral level.

Im wondering if these books are ones nobody wants to store, rather than being priceless treasures- IIRC libraries destroy books almost constantly as part of normal inventory management. That’s also probably the lowest cost provider.

I'm told a lot of this stuff is books nobody really cares for like technical manuals on obsolete technology and the like. But it's always hard to predict what history will regard as important when the Rosetta Stone, one of the reasons we can even understand hieroglyphs, was some fragment of a tax document.

It was prescient of Vinge to predict in fiction that in a couple decades we'd be shredding books to help us digitize them, but it's so much more dystopian that the main reason for shredding them in reality isn't so we can use cool algorithms to digitize them faster, it's just so we don't run afoul of the application of copyright laws even when the copyrighted books are so long-forgotten that the physical copies are almost all gone.

Ah, well, it is just fiction. In Vinge's book there was also AI which, despite being superhuman at hacking and able to evade human control when it wanted, somehow seemed to enjoy chatting with humans, following even their worst orders most of the time, and generating images of cartoon animals. What kind of nonsense is that?

I believe this "destroy records as part of storing them more efficiently" controversy already happened decades ago with microfilm, so Vinge was just calling back to that experience, not necessarily being prescient.

I feel like whether he was trying to be prescient ought to be a seperate question from whether he was being prescient.

In theory I agree with you, but there is something oddly inhuman about Anthropic. I’m not entirely convinced that they don’t want to scan me for all relevant information and then rip my spine out for convenience. I would be reassured if they showed a bit more sentimentality for physical artifacts!

I'm torn on how I feel about this for the same reason. The issue is not that books are actually sacred. I don't think destroying a non-rare book is any worse than destroying a wooden board or a plastic sheet in practice. But it is a cultural taboo, and demonstrates disrespect for culture and social norms in favor of sheer utilitarian efficiency. Anthropic has demonstrated here that they care more about being efficient and saving money than adhering to social norms.

I think I'm tentatively on their side here, because the public anti-AI crowd has so far demonstrated incredible levels of unreasonableness regarding AI "stealing art" or "wasting water". They're going to come up with something stupid to complain about and hate Anthropic no matter what, so there's little reason for them to respect any other taboos because they'll be hated either way. Crying wolf causes so many problems. I'm still concerned about what this implies about Anthropic's attitude as a corporate entity, but not upset at the event for its own sake.

Some ACX people were really angry about this a few months ago, and I really did not understand the outrage. Libraries, bookshops, charity shops etc. destroy tens of millions of books every year, and no one cares. Besides which, Anthropic bought the books. I had this crazy idea that, if you own an item, it's your right to do with it what you please, provided you don't violate any other laws in the process.

The whole story is just a boo-light for people who dislike AI for other reasons.

So even though Anthropic didn't have to destroy their books, at least they apparently haven't destroyed anything truly rare.

I'm pretty sure the non-destructive scanners are faster and cheaper, and I'm not sure the expense is justified for scanning mass-market "slop" books. The "rare" books they're trying to invoke here (first printings, etc) are almost exclusively out of copyright (and this likely already scanned and available on Project Gutenberg), and I doubt they're paying extra for anything that's currently in print.

Destroying books for many evokes (or is even the same as) book-burning. And many consider destroying books to be one of the greatest evils imaginable.

Are you familiar with how libraries dispose of old, unread, and poor-condition texts already? They aren't usually building new storage space to go with the new books they buy regularly. Unsold books at bookstores have historically been "stripped" (cover removed and returned to publisher for refund) and destroyed. I can appreciate a general reverence for books, but there was no shortage of books getting recycled before AI.

I'm pretty sure the non-destructive scanners are faster and cheaper

Most non destructive scanners require someone to turn each page of the book. Google books invented a complicated machine to do this. Slicing the book open is much simpler, you can feed it to a COTS multi-page scanner.

Societies perpetuate their values through Symbols, and these are incumbent in a reverence for books and such, and this sort of thing can be considered acts of communication. A company that has reached mythological levels of performative and broadly recognized evil is now implicated in a new feat of symbolic desecration. If you recognize that SYMBOLS, COMMUNICATION, RITUAL, GESTURES, and so forth can matter in terms of a society coordinating itself, then it's rather dull to switch tracks and start talking about the utilitarian benefit of century old pulp novels.

Societies perpetuate their values through Symbols

Of course they do, which is why the mythological implications of the LLM are so extreme, they are symbol-generators.

The destruction of copies of books for training an LLM is not doing any meaningful damage to the transmission of values or knowledge to society.

What is performative is the Reddit-tier scandalization by the destruction of books. That, too, is downstream from the perpetuation of societal memes around Nazi book-burning. Of course none of the "banned book" subreddits or "banned book" stores carry the books I might have on my bookshelf, those are actually banned books and the Redditors who will cry about books being banned don't care- in their mind To Kill a Mockingbird is a banned book, and The Hoax of the Twentieth Century is the embodiment of evil that should be banned everywhere.

Amazon has long-engaged in book banning right-wing publishers and books, and nobody really cares about "symbolic desecration." It's performative anti-authoritarianism used as a guise for their own brand of authoritarianism.

Amazon has long-engaged in book banning right-wing publishers and books, and nobody really cares about "symbolic desecration."

Well, some people do.

My understanding is the practice has expanded lately so maybe it's causing more controversy. When it was Holocaust Revisionist books and books like Kevin McDonald's Culture of Critique, basically the first books targeted by Amazon book banning, it didn't generate any controversy.

The Revisionist publisher even had to switch publishers because of government pressure on the very printing shops. They had to finance their own printing shops and sell themselves. Have never seen anyone going on about the sacred nature of "banned books" be remotely interested in that actual struggle.

There was and still is a caliber of anarchist that has The Turner Diaries next to Lolita and The Science of Revolutionary Warfare in their library because they can.

I know some liberals thirsting for cheap radical chic setup this whole "banned books" meme where they pretend a handful of their favorite authors are subversive whilst not even knowing what Der Schelm is let alone that it's classified as a criminal organisation. But don't let that disabuse you that there is still a contingent of people who care about this in principle.

But don't let that disabuse you that there is still a contingent of people who care about this in principle.

That contingent has proved itself utterly powerless to advance its aims. Attempts to actualize the principle will simply enable the cheap radical chic setup, while providing no perceptible advantage to the supposed principle. Given this inability, the cost/benefit for arguing in favor of protecting "bad" material should be reassessed; if toleration of things you consider bad observably does not secure toleration of things you consider good in turn, what is the point of extending such tolerance? Previous arguments assumed some sort of reciprocity, but that reciprocity observably does not exist, and so it is necessary to reassess those arguments in light of this new data.

if toleration of things you consider bad observably does not secure toleration of things you consider good in turn, what is the point of extending such tolerance?

Because it is morally righteous, insofar as knowledge is a common. Reciprocity isn't necessary for this to be the case.

A difficult sell in these chthonic times, I know. But do we not judge the previous people of the winter on what they managed to save?

So even though Anthropic didn't have to destroy their books, at least they apparently haven't destroyed anything truly rare.

I'll note first that I am one of those hippy-dippy people with a sacred feeling about books. I don't throw them away, I don't destroy them. It took an effort of will to become a person who writes in books, and then only for very special reasons.

I recently purchased a huge number of rare, old, or first edition books at auction. I don't intend to physically read any of the copies, they have a totemic value to me. Owning a first printing of Hemingway is something I imagine has a kind of mystical field about it, like an item in a video game.

I have trouble believing that they destroyed anything truly valuable, and rare does not equal valuable. Within the auction were many books I'd never heard of, first edition first printing, but just some airport novel about people on Nantucket published in the 80s that hasn't much been preserved or cared about or read since then.

It's possible that Anthropic purchased one of those books that is "rare" in the sense of infrequently appearing, but not "rare" in the sense of valuable or desirable.

In a sense, a book like that, a dead novel that hasn't been read in decades, has been given new and eternal life, becoming a mote within the great consciousness. Couldn't a turn of phrase or a piece of advice from an 80s airport novel become, by whatever occult means within the system, revived and returned to the discourse?

I think people think that there are more good books than there actually are.

Looking at e.g., the latest book releases on Standard Ebooks, I recognize none of the new titles, so in some sense that site is already scraping the bottom of the barrel, despite having a catalog of a mere ~1500 books. Gutenberg's at like 78k books (though many are duplicates), and both all the titles and all the authors of the new releases are completely unrecognizable.

At the scale of millions of "books" (many of which aren't really books as the term's commonly used), well... you can randomly sample a url between https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000000001 and https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009999999 to get some sense how nothing most texts really are. It's great that they're digitized, and hopefully no non-digitized books are lost fully, but it would hardly matter if they were. No human will ever read the vast majority of these.

I think people think that there are more good books than there actually are.

Looking at e.g., the latest book releases on Standard Ebooks, I recognize none of the new titles, so in some sense that site is already scraping the bottom of the barrel, despite having a catalog of a mere ~1500 books. Gutenberg's at like 78k books (though many are duplicates), and both all the titles and all the authors of the new releases are completely unrecognizable.

Books can be "good" in a conditional sense.

When I was researching the real world history of elementals for my D&D game, I found Parcelsus' "A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits" and "The Comte De Gabelis" invaluable. And while those books are hardly obscure in the right circles, I also don't think most people's lives would be at all impoverished if they never read those books. And yet, I am happy I was able to read them, and would consider it a shame if they hadn't survived to the modern day.

There are plenty of other books that are only conditionally useful for someone researching a very particular thing, and unlikely to be read by the vast majority of the reading public.

Most written texts have been lost. Scholars generally estimate that well over 90% of classical Greek and Latin literature is gone.

I don't know about you but I would certainly like to read the remaining hundred of works by Aristotle that didn't make it, like his treatise on comedy, the 158 constitutions or the Protrepticus.

Sure there's a lot of slop and we're overflowing with slop since printing became ubiquitous, but the reflex to keep everything is understandable given how much actually important mega famous history defining classics we have lost to neglect over the years.

A slightly more solid number (Ctrl-F "commercial value"): As of year 1998, only two percent of copyrights with age of 55–75 years retained any commercial value. That is, after 55 years, 98 percent of copyrighted works are forgotten and worthless.

I think this is one of those moments where you'd want to step in in favor of the scoundrels of books, if you want a principled defense of the books you want saved. It seems like it was only yesterday folks were lamenting the original Dr Seuss books. Do you want to entrust anyone but yourself with the right to decide what is archived, and what is fed into the slopmachine and then wiped?

Do you want to entrust anyone but yourself with the right to decide what is archived, and what is fed into the slopmachine and then wiped?

Unless Anthropic (and other LLM companies) are hunting down every copy of a particular edition of a particular book when they scan it in, I don't see how their behavior would have particular impact on this. Anthropic has negative incentive to do such a thing, because each copy of a book they find costs money to purchase and destroy, but the value they get out of using the book for training only exists for the first copy of the book.

Surely there are some editions of some books out there for which only one or a handful of physical copies remains, which was then purchased by and destroyed by Anthropic (or Google Books or some other mass-scanner), leaving either none or very few which are extremely hard to access by most people (being in obscure archives in obscure libraries). It seems unlikely to me that this set of editions of books has much intersection with the set of editions of books for which keeping at least one copy around is of immense value to humanity; generally, such books also have sufficient cultural value and monetary value that people keep them protected and/or available for display.

If the belief is that humanity ought to indefinitely preserve at least one physical copy of each and every edition of every book that has ever been published, this doesn't seem like the worst goal, but also doesn't seem like a goal that Anthropic or other AI companies (or book scanners) have any responsibility of fulfilling. People who believe that humanity has a duty to preserve at least one physical copy of all these books ought to be the change they want to see in the world.

But that's the point, if you're hoovering up books by the bushel, why use destructive methods and not simply scan them and hand over the discards to people who care about conservation?

Besides the legal obligation to do the stupid thing, of course.

hand over the discards to people who care about conservation

Do these exist? Conservation as in, at a bare minimum, being willing to take the pages (we can leave off "and use appropriate conservation techniques," because that will make an already small group dwindle to literally nothing). And, to be explicit, "post an angry rant about evil AI companies on Reddit" does not count as caring about conservation for the point of this exercise.

Jason Scott is a real person, yes.

And yet, he also resorts to debinding for scanning (or "destructively" scans).

Understand I don't regard the artifact itself to have much value (when it comes to glued magazines anyways, old hardcovers deserve to live even if they're cookbooks). The difference here is the public gets the damn content for free, not a shadow filtered through a subscription based statistical model.

Besides the legal obligation to do the stupid thing, of course.

Unfortunately, I think we live in a world where some legal obligation is the reason for a lot of stupid, destructive things happening, and this is just the latest in a very long list.

I don't know the details, but I heard that destroying books while scanning is cheaper due to the logistics of opening the book and holding it open page-by-page, but also I heard that it was the opposite, so I don't know. If the former is the case, then that provides a good non-legally-mandated-stupidity reason for the destruction as well.

That said, I imagine we're not too far from having the image processing tech required to have something akin to Futurama where Bender (a 30th/31st century android) just flips through a book in 5 seconds like a flip book and then declares that he's read it. Taking a distorted, side-angled photo of a bent/curved page of a book and converting it to a perfect copy of the original page that is literally indistinguishable, even by an AI, from an actual proper scan of the page after it had been removed from the book seems like it will be within the realm of possibility pretty soon, if not already (depending on how literally you take the word "literally"), and once we have that, it's just a matter of having cameras with sufficiently high fidelity and framerates.

That said, I imagine we're not too far from having the image processing tech required to have something akin to Futurama where Bender (a 30th/31st century android) just flips through a book in 5 seconds like a flip book and then declares that he's read it. Taking a distorted, side-angled photo of a bent/curved page of a book and converting it to a perfect copy of the original page that is literally indistinguishable, even by an AI, from an actual proper scan of the page after it had been removed from the book seems like it will be within the realm of possibility pretty soon, if not already (depending on how literally you take the word "literally"), and once we have that, it's just a matter of having cameras with sufficiently high fidelity and framerates.

We're probably already there if we were to invest in expensive machines to do so.

I'm not sure it'd make a difference, the people who complain about the destructive scanning would pivot to complaining about so many ressources being spent that could be used for taking in more refugees being used just to feed the AI slopmachines, and what about all the water being wasted to cool all those scanners?

OP goes over this. Destroying doesn't mean they destroy the page, but scanning works best and fastest if you can get the pages very flat against a scanner. Book spines get in the way, sometimes the text get warped as the spine won't allow the page to lay fully flat against the scanner. Not to mention that you need someone (or a way more complicated machine) to manhandle all these books and spines to get the page to lay as flat as you can for scanning. Scanning a whole book of hundreds of pages that way is a job that would take someone many hours. Compare to cutting the spine, making all the pages loose and stacking them in a document feeder to feed them all one by one, perfectly flat against the scanner. It's not only the fastest, least annoying way to scan, it's the highest quality one. BUT it needs sacrificing the spine.

I'm someone who loves physical books. Indeed, I collect them, to my wife's perpetual disapproval; I've got multiple Arion and Grabhorn and Centipede books, sometimes running into four figures per. Particularly relevant to Anthropic, a pride and joy of mine is an original edition of Rosenblatt's Principles of Neurodynamics, in fine condition with a fine dust jacket (it's difficult to find in any condition).

This is all just faux outrage. The vast majority of these books are ex-lib, non-unique, decaying physical copies of books that no one actually cares about anyway. The booksellers who Anthropic is purchasing them from would send them to the dump eventually. Anthropic isn't shredding the Gutenberg Bible, or anything even a couple steps in principle removed from it.

My only real moral complaint is that Anthropic should be uploading them post-processing to Anna's Archive, though it's understandable why they didn't.

It was bad that they were sending them to the dump, too. It doesn't become less bad just because most people wouldn't think of it until now.

We have the storage. Billions of pulp novels must be uploaded. They were worth printing once, they are certainly worth archiving.

They were worth printing once, they are certainly worth archiving.

They were worth printing thousands of times each. Would your archive contain one copy of each distinct work, or every single book that came off the presses?

Storage here would mean a massive, climate controlled, disaster resilient library-warehouse, requiring a team of specialists. You can't just pile the books up in a bunch of cardboard boxes; every year you'd have X% decay into oblivion. It would also be closed off to the public.

There's a reason no one does this: no one cares, given the costs involved. I'm sure Anthropic would have been happy to just ship them to someone else for preservation, but who would take them?

I don't mean store the dead trees. I mean store the data, in free public access.

That's forbidden by copyright law.

The advent of generative AI in 2022 has resulted in a lot of talk about copyright, and if Anthropic decided to unilaterally declare copyright as a concept that's become obsoleted by gen AI and which belongs in the dustbin of history like slavery and lobotomy, that would certainly make the ongoing AI-related culture wars that much more interesting. Now I kinda want to see that happen.

Information should be free! except for distilling.

Oh, misread. Yes, they should be stored and made available to the public. But I'm sure they are storing them internally as part of their training corpus. As for the public, many or most of them are under copyright still; I have plenty of complaints about that, but I can understand why Anthropic doesn't want to exacerbate its existing copyright issues.

It is wrong to destroy these books.

Not because Anthropic is slurping all of human knowledge into the evil black obelisk so as to enact the "the [sic] came for CD/DVD. they are coming for our guns" future. No it's evil for a much more obviously reason: it is unnecessary destruction.

They are being forced to do so by an evil cartel that conspired to give itself an unnatural monopoly over thoughts and ideas.

This process does not have to be destructive except for the fact that if it was not, some people unseen in this picture could not continue their rent seeking unmolested. They're the real evil masterminds here. But since they are our established evil overlords and not some unsympathetic newcomer, they somehow get to not bear the responsibility of destroying knowledge in the name of saving it. Even through it is all done at their behest, at the point of the sword.

And this isn't an isolated example. How many cherished stories, songs and other cultural artifacts are stuck in legal limbo, barred from existence by laws that purport to protect them? NOLF, The Grey Album, Prince's vault, Nosferatu... There's a reason AI labs had to turn to pirates to gather their datasets, and it's that only pirates are actually serious about the conservation of human knowledge at this point. I'll go as far as to make the claim that, since its inception, copyright has destroyed more of human endeavor than it has created.

Well said.

It was frustrating seeing headlines blaming Anthropic for destroying rare books, when it was the incentives around copyright law that made it more cost effective and efficient to do it this way.

Heck, I'm usually more okay with patent law than copyright law, but there's even a patent angle to this story. OP's post mentioned:

By contrast, the Google Books project largely used a patented non-destructive camera process to scan millions of books borrowed from libraries and later returned.

But here's the thing, if Google had just given the patents away in this case, Anthropic could have made some of these non-destructive scanners and done the same thing. Because Google decided to sit on this technology instead, Anthropic's hands were further tied, and they did what was cheap and easy instead.

While my first impulse is to sympathize with the general sentiment of your post i have to disagree with the conclusion. Anthropic's hands were not "tied" nobody forced them to act as the did. They chose the path they did because it was convenient and economical. and that is something they will have to live with because thier souls are in thier keeping alone.

Oh boy, from the makers of "AI is taking a pee in our Holy Drinking Water" now comes "AI is burning our Holy Books". It's the burgeoning "sanctity" moral foundation of progressives asserting itself, I'm not sure there's much of a point arguing it. Either you agree with it and feel it or you don't.

Destroying books is generally fine because physical media is obsolete. If they're special books, keep them, otherwise if you really want to preserve them, M-DISC will last longer and is more compact.

But the data shouldn't be destroyed. Storage is cheap, and even nearly useless data isn't completely useless, evidenced by AI training. Nor should Anthropic be the only ones with access to it, there may be other uses.

The authors of these books are long dead, that they're still under copyright is a testament to how flawed our legal system is.

physical media is obsolete

Not remotely. Physical media is the only way to ensure you actually own something. We've seen that even digital "purchases" can be revoked from your account because the media cartel says you don't get to have that any more. But they can't (yet, I guess) remotely destroy your DVDs, paper books, and so on.

Also, when it comes to books specifically, paper is still far and away the best reading experience you can have. Easy on the eyes, requires no tech, and they have a pleasant tactile nature which no ebook reader will ever be able to match.

Revocable digital purchases are a separate problem, you can own something digitally by obtaining the raw text (or Markdown or a simple PDF).

physical media is obsolete

I beg to differ. Books are one of the best medium for storing texts long term because unlike disks and tape, they are driverless and shelf stable. M-DISC is all well and good but the day that there is no longer an incentive to make and/or fix mechanical disk drives, you are SOL. Books only need to be stored properly and you can always recover them with the Mk1 Eyeball.

I agree with the sentiment, but for what it's worth, most modern books don't have this kind of longevity. If you go to a bookstore today, everything you see inside is going to be printed on cheap paper that will decay and become unreadable after a couple of hundred years. Mostly we don't care about this because we have no aspirations of these books lasting that long.

If you go to a museum or academic library and ask the curators about some of their really old books, the ones that have survived are on more resilient media. The Book of Kells is still readable today, in part because vellum is significantly more durable than paper. But this is true of paper as well. If you find, say, a Geneva Bible from the 16th century, those were printed on thicker paper than most mass market books today, and thus have survived in a readable state even with heavy use.

It's the acid content of books from the 19th and 20th century that make them degrade so fast, moreso than the thickness (though the flimsiness of the pages doesn't help).

I'll be honest - I am repeating what I was told by a library curator years ago. I remember that modern books will decay relatively rapidly, while many older books are more resilient, but I do not remember the scientific explanation.

So thank you for the correction! I appreciate it.

It might also be so that there is no longer an incentive to learn extinct languages such as 2026 English.

My intuition tells me it's easier to lapse in maintaining climate in a warehouse than lose disk reader technology.

There are still people who keep old English learnable(indeed, you can get some pretty good online courses)- and unlike Latin, Greek(Greek programs would barely exist anymore if it wasn’t for evangelicals buying ‘New Testament Greek’ lessons to cover expenses), or Hebrew, this isn’t due to religious necessity.

Do most people learn Latin and Greek for ecclesiastic purposes? Seems more of a classicist thing (Princeton's efforts notwithstanding).

With all due respect to your instinct, how is it easier to maintain access to complex semiconductors and high precision motors than maintain a room dry and free of sunlight on a centuries long timeframe?

Bitrot is a thing, though. One of the cool technologies MS is working on is glass storage technology.

The 32-page legal decision

Court documents, including the full text of the judge's opinion

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