Our family volunteers at a nonprofit that moves a huge number of books. We take donations and run massive charity sales, clearing tens of thousands of books a month. Pricing works like a ladder: you try to sell a book for a couple of bucks, then for a dollar, then by the $5 bag, then for free, and you still end up with thousands of books nobody wants even at no cost. These used to go straight to pulp. Now they go to AI labs for scanning. Would we rather they were read, or at least owned, by someone? Yes. Is scanning better than turning them into toilet paper? Yes, even if only marginally.
I'm sure the Anthropics of the world have shredded the last known copies of plenty of titles. But nobody talks about the last known copies that get pulped every day simply because there are so many books nobody wants and storing them is expensive.
My wife loves bulk book hauls. Those places that we frequent, work like a literal permanent discount warehouse - books in high shelves, on pallets, everywhere. Often hundreds of issues of the same one.
But there is so many books there that no one want's to read. Hundreds of the same book lying there for months or years.
Same for public book-sharing "libraries" (small shelves that look like bird house, usually in parks etc). People really like them and there are many in my city, but most books there are products of a gone era and a gone mindset. No one want's that even for free.
We were taught respect for books, but not everything is worth preserving.
I didn't go this year but my local town library has a book sale where books go for something like $10/bag. I donate some books to them throughout the year. There are still a lot of books available on the last or second to last day of the sale. I'm sure a huge number get pulped.
Well, they could turn the bad faith story into a good faith story by making them available for everyone to download perhaps. (AI companies "saving" old books!) But that would require giving a s*t which they don't and that is the real problem imho.
That would require effort (to sort, acquire copyright, etc) which they wouldn't put in. Because they don't care.
People obviously feel bad about companies doing this. People reading these stories don't care what's legal, they care what's ethical. Heck, re-publishing long lost material would make AI companies heroes instead of bad guys.
> That would require effort (to sort, acquire copyright, etc) which they wouldn't put in. Because they don't care.
I don't think you have any idea how expensive it is to acquire the copyright for a single book with the intent of making it freely available online. That's equivalent to asking the rights holders to perpetually forgo all possible earnings from the material, and they expect to be compensated accordingly. Even paying lawyers to begin assembling what's needed to make this happen would be five figures per book to get started.
Distributing copyrighted works (prior to expiration of their copyright) verbatim is illegal.
Training an LLM on copyrighted works is not illegal.
This whole debate has been tried in court already. Calling it IP theft only stands on individual moral grounds, but the law allows for derivative works.
Google attempted to do this 15 years ago, they got sued and stopped. It turns out that tech companies occasionally do have to follow the law, you'd think people would be happier about that...
Wait, if you’re talking about the Google Books case, Google won. Maybe they made adjustments on how they served results but they certainly did not stop.
The Google Books settlement was originally going to make Google into a clearinghouse for scans of out-of-print books. The scans would have been available for individuals to purchase for a reasonable price, and libraries and institutions would have been able to subscribe to a service that would give patrons access to the full text of every book. This deal fell apart because some research libraries and authors argued this was anti-competitive, as anyone wanting to make a competing service would have to go through the same process as Google of settling a class action lawsuit. They instead wanted Congress to pass a law to free up the rights to orphaned books. No progress on this was subsequently made because nobody in Congress cares enough about the rights to out-of-print books to get legislation passed. The whole reason why they're out of print when ebooks and print-on-demand exist is that they won't get enough sales to make it worth the time and money to figure out who the royalties should go to. The result is that nobody outside Google gets to see the full Google Books scans.
I have a similar thought too each time I walk past piles of discount books.
I'm in the camp that perhaps it's healthy to not grasp onto every bit of information. that some artifacts dying a natural death is maybe just the way things are
A lot of these books are reference titles that are outdated to the point of uselessness and/or weren't that great/interesting when they were new. Not many people have interest in or use for textbooks from the 50s.
They have to destroy the copy either way for it to be fair use (according to Bartz v Anthropic). Cutting the bindings off is already the faster method to scan, and once you're required to pulp the original anyway, it becomes a no-brainer.
The relevant part of the ruling starts on page 27.
For the print library copies that Anthropic purchased and then converted into digital library copies, Anthropic already enjoyed entitlement to keep the copies in its library. The purpose of the copying was to keep them in its library but with more favorable storage and searchability properties. Copying the entire work was exactly what this purpose required. There was no surplus copying. The source copy was destroyed.
The third fair use factor favors fair use for the purchased library copies converted from print to digital.
Fair use favors the destruction to avoid accidental surplus copying of the source material. It doesn't require it. If Anthropic put everything in a warehouse, they could keep it in the warehouse... but they couldn't do anything with them afterwards. They couldn't sell them as books or donate them as that would mean that it wasn't fair use and copyright infringement would have taken place once that additional copy was distributed again. At that point, fair use and economics both favor destroying the original.
If I make a DVD copy of an old VHS tape that I own, that's fair use format shifting. I can keep the VHS tape without issue. I cannot donate it to the library or put it out in a garage sale. When I got rid of my VHS player, I threw out VHS tapes too since they were of no use and only cluttered my shelf.
The judge ruled that format shifting was fair use. The fair use argument was enhanced because the original was destroyed. Hypothetically, one could do only the format shifting and keep the original - but the original could not be sold or donated or otherwise given away because then the format shifted copy would not be fair use.
I can burn DVD copies of my old VHS tapes. I cannot then give away the old VHS tapes or sell them at a garage sale. If I keep them, they're cluttering the shelf... so the VHS tape gets thrown away afterwards.
> Now they go to AI labs for scanning. Would we rather they were read, or at least owned, by someone? Yes. Is scanning better than turning them into toilet paper? Yes, even if only marginally.
Yeah, now instead of old books being turned into toilet paper, we'll get turned into toilet paper. Much better.
But Sam Altman will become richer than God, and isn't that what really matters?
But don't worry! You'll still have access to ChatGPT until your savings run out.
> Again, do you have an actual objection to the subject of the article
I was responding to a comment, which apparently is another thing you missed. Maybe work on not doing that, instead of snarkily asking for everything to be carefully spelled out to you?
> or are you just mad it enriches people you don't like?
It would also be incorrect. "Up to" doesn't mean any possible upper bound, it describes the top of a known range. I can't say a car I'm selling goes "up to" 900mph if it tops out at 120mph.
¹ drivers are responsible to get the car into a low earth orbit themselves and need to be familiar with the orbital maneuvers needed to accelerate the car to 900mph
Funnily enough, for me AI writing is usually the summarizer rather than expander. I would usually give Claude 2-3x the amount of data in notes, context, braindump etc; when doing person-to-person communication, using AI to _expand_ the context rather than shrink it is doing everyone a disservice.
At some point, the rabid anti-generative AI crowd becomes tiring. This is extremely masturbatory and very intellectually lazy piece of writing whose only purpose is to raise cheers from the same echo chamber an author is in.
It's a reaction. Nobody would be "anti-AI" if AI wasn't being shoved into everything while at the same time shaming you like you're stupid for not enjoying literal slop.
Sometimes I get code handed to review that has to same variables set multiple times, additional classes/methods/functions added that aren't used, and when questioned I get a shrug as a response.
Slop.
Sometimes they review it and tidy before handing it over. Much like although we have printing presses, hopefully someone reviews it to make sure that they actually printed square on the page.
Not slop.
The problem is that we have lazy people and mandatory LLM usage has forced us to confront these people that don't even proof what they write. Before they would just hide in the background and not do anything.
No, this isn't what I mean. What does the word "literal" mean to you?
Because to me it means the opposite of figurative.
Ex., if I say "It literally costs an arm and a leg", that means I'm really paying in body parts.
Or if I say "Your book bag literally weighs a ton", it means I'm saying it's actually 2000 lbs. and would take heavy machinery to lift it.
Or in this case, you are saying the "slop" program or code somehow actually transformed into some mystery food melted into a gelatinous dish when you add "literal" to it.
Given how bad some of the models do on somewhat similar problems, I'm sure pelican is included in training set now.
Similar problems - given airplane outline and implementation constraints do painting scheme (constraints something like "it will be implemented using covering film, hence no gradients, no impossible cuts, not more than 2 colors on engine cowl, etc). Google Gemini is meh, but GPT models are just terrible, don't have Anthropic subscription at home, hence have not tested.
Bad pelicans are in the training set because it's read his blog post. Including a good pelican in midtraining wouldn't help the problem because you'd just produce that every time.
Based on the name, he's either Ukrainian running away from the war, or Russian, running away from being complicit in the war. Shitty situation to be in either way.
Necessary context for someone probably being more detached from US politics:
Former FBI Director James Comey — fired by Trump in 2017 and one of his most prominent critics ever since — was indicted this week by Trump's Justice Department for allegedly threatening the president's life through a May 2025 Instagram photo of seashells arranged to spell "8647" (a protest slogan where "86" is slang for "get rid of" and "47" refers to Trump as the 47th president), which Comey says he intended as political commentary, not a call to violence.
A snide and vitriolic remark that observes on how the first paragraph actually addresses the concern of the person which hasn't read the article. A further continuation on this being representative of the state of modern online discourse.
I'm sure the Anthropics of the world have shredded the last known copies of plenty of titles. But nobody talks about the last known copies that get pulped every day simply because there are so many books nobody wants and storing them is expensive.
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