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To skirt copyright law, Anthropic bought and destroyed millions of physical books to train its "Claude" LLM (arstechnica.com)

submitted 13 hours ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world

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[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 112 points 12 hours ago (10 children)

To comply with copyright law, not to skirt it. That's what companies that scan large numbers of books do. See for example Authors Guild v. Google from back when Google was scanning books to add to their book search engine. Framing this like it's some kind of nefarious act is misleading.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 59 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

They also weren't destroying rare books. They were buying in-print books from major retailers, which means that while yes, that is environmentally wasteful, it's not actually destroying books in the classical destruction of knowledge sense since the manufacturer will just print another one if there's demand for it.

[–] MrQuallzin@lemmy.world 20 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

This as well. Growing up in a house of book lovers, myself included, destroying a book was akin to kicking a puppy. Realistically though, they're ultimately consumables. They're meant to be bought, used, and replaced as needed. With luck the destruction included recycling as much as possible, seeing as it's mainly paper.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 3 points 5 hours ago

Precisely, there's a reason that these days, books made for libraries are made to an entirely different standard than books sold at your local book store.

[–] MDCCCLV@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 hours ago

Yeah, you have millions of old books that nobody wants not even collectors. It's not just popular literature.

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