In the filings, Anthropic states, as reported by the Washington Post: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world. We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
Write a book where the spine is a required piece of the story for its understanding or completion.
Kind of like how House of Leaves is best enjoyed with the actual book.
I swore I wouldn’t buy another physical book, but I may break it just to be able to read this one.
I love reading actual books. I don’t know why you would quit if you can afford it
I recently had to move with my physical book collection and swore I wouldn’t do it again. I converted it all to ebook now. I’m down to about a dozen physical books, not counting comics and TPBs.
It’s a worthy story. Lots of little Easter eggs.
Article is not available without registering. As for the title, “destructive” book scanning means you cut off the binding and put the pages in a scanner which easily flips through them and takes the pictures. If you’re not scanning rare old books, this is a perfectly reasonable way to do it, because setting up a scanner for a normal book and manually turning each page to scan it takes a long time (Internet Archive has videos on how they do it, very nice and impressive, and logical since their original mission was scanning old public domain stuff, i.e. published before 1930 or so). If Anthropic will actually legally buy all those thousands upon thousands of books, that will be a pleasant precedent for an AI company.
Although I very much doubt that random uncritically gathered textual material can “teach their AI tool how to write well”. They’re still pushing for more and more training data, even though it’s clear actual advancement will have to happen (if it can happen) through more refined usage of / training on the data.
Still creating shitloads of trash.
Is this an opportunity to self-publish my own book for $100k per copy and be guaranteed one sale?
No they will simply steal it, like they usually do.
Just don’t write it in any OS that backs up your stuff to their cloud…you know…for safe keeping…
Anthropic has a cloud service? I thought it was just the LLM, and I guess whatever software plugins
I assume “destructively scan” means to cut the spine off so they lie flat, and that one copy of each book will be scanned? Isn’t that a pretty normal way of doing it in cases where the prints aren’t rare?
Probably, yes. I think there’s a copyright reason behind destroying the book?
Not copyright, as much as if the book isn’t precious, it’s easier to do that, feed the loose pages into the scanner, and then get an intact one if you want it, compared to the additional expense of having to build and program a machine to carefully turn the pages and photograph what’s inside, or the time it would need by comparison.
It just doesn’t work if the spine is still there.
Or throw the book into a shredder connected to a scanner that combines the page puzzle internally.
Yes, but I don’t think they’re checking what they’re ingesting super hard, especially at those volumes.
“Rainbows End”?
Bingo. You’ve nailed it.
When a bookstore goes out of business or just can’t sell a book, they don’t return it to the printers, they tear off the cover, return that and by law have to throw the rest of the book in the trash and destroy it. So books are already destroyed by the millions. When I was a kid our hometown bookstore went out of business and I watched them throw away 2 metal dumpsters full of coverless books. If they were destroying ancient texts or valuable copies, that would be more something to get excited about. I doubt that they were doing that though.
I don’t mind if they destroy 10k copies of Fabio’s books. It’s probably not even half of the print run so for a thing, it’s guaranteed to be no harm because there’s enough copies around.
But when you say destroy ALL books, you’re also talking about rare first edition of whatever Shakespeare did, and manuscripts of Beethoven, and authors that I am fond of but I have no chance to buy used or new, or find in a library, because it’s not popular and/or is in a language that is not from the place I live. And that’s not cool.
So first things first, no single entity can have access to all books. Not even reputable historians would get access to anything they just ask around. Then there’s books that have few copies and no one has any clue where they are. Etc etc.
Yeah that’s exactly it. James Patterson, for example, has written dozens of books, and there are billions of his books alone. They’re taking one of each, cutting off the binding, and scanning the pages. This is standard procedure for common books.
So why don’t they want people knowing about it? Because a lot of people are anti-AI and will run misleading stories like this.
I’m as anti-AI as the next guy, but unlike other companies scraping all of reddit and stealing art off the Internet, these guys are doing it mostly properly by paying for the books. They still don’t have a license to use the material in this manner, though.
They don’t need a license to use material in this way under extant US law. Copyright is overwhelmingly about reproduction rather than consumption.
They also initially took content from libgen, which is a fair bit less legal. Personally, I have mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand, I don’t like some shitty for-profit AI company making money from the collective works of civilisation. On the other hand, I think copyright protects works for far too long anyway and most should be in the commons already. Mind you, I would be more sympathetic if Anthropic et al. were doing all this for research purposes instead of capitalism. Maybe that would be a better copyright reform, in that it expires much more quickly than the current laws (say 10 years) but restricts third parties making a profit for a longer period. Likely that would be complex to design and enforce, however.
That much was absolutely is something to get worked up about. Just because it happens more than people realize, that doesn’t make it okay.
Words and ideas don’t become sacred when they are committed to paper. Unless they destroyed the last copy of something that has not been digitized, this is totally fine.
Sure, but it is rather a waste of paper, ink, manufacturing and transportation capacity etc. It’s not the only instance of this of course, waste of unsold inventory exists in just about any industry that sells physical products, but it’s still frustrating to see it.
This seems more like an indictment of the practice of physical publishing than destructive book scanning, in which case I generally agree. There are a host of industries with baked-in inefficiencies that our life experiences have conditioned us to accept as normal or unavoidable when really have no business persisting in the modern world. Printed books is definitely one of them.
I wouldn’t say print books have no place today, it can’t be assumed that one will have access to electronics in all circumstances after all and many people do prefer physical media, but it’s definitely an indictment of the sort of cheaply made basically disposable books made in larger quantities than needed to fill their current niche, and of the way unwanted (by their owners) but usable goods are dealt with in general.
Yeah, you’re right to clarify that, saying printed word has absolutely no place is hyperbolic and wrong. In cases where it is necessary to maintain parity of information access, paper is fine.
I didn’t say words were sacred, but destroying millions of books is a colossal waste of resources. This is not totally fine.
The resources were wasted by the publishers when they transformed the resources into a finished product with very limited utility and reusability. Books on shelves are not resources.
The resources were wasted by everyone involved. Stop defending this bullshit.
No, I won’t stop calling things like I see them, and I am unlikely to see them differently unless presented with an actual argument (premise, claim, evidence, impact) that amounts to more than “no u”
“…plans in early 2024 to scan “all the books in the world” to teach their AI tool “how to write well”.“ — That’s like teaching a writing course by only reading.
What are they? The giant brains from Futurama? Are they building an infosphere?
Pointless anti ai propaganda.
Tamara left you to find someone who IS anti-AI.
Good.
^ Pointless AI propaganda
That’s a really great observation! Let’s dive into that.
