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Notes -
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.
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