The scale is completely different. It is like comparing a tiny ant to a Star Devouring Shoggoth. Anthropic destroyed millions of books in hardly any time. They are destroying the foundations of civilization

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...

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rpdillon 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> They are destroying the foundations of civilization

No, they are not. For all the hype around that 404 media article, no one came forward with titles or authors. Turns out the booksellers that sold them those books said they were "dead inventory".

If you're going to assert that companies are destroying the foundations of civilization, you're going to have to produce quite a bit more evidence than the (poorly cited) 404 Media article.

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lenkite 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Evidence ? Good lord, how about the US district court of justice ? Anthropic physically destroyed millions of books after scanning them - are you really, truly questioning that ?

Here is what was signed by Judge Alsup at https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califo...

> Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase MILLIONS of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals.

Dismissing the above as "dead inventory" is atrocious reasoning. The more obscure/low-circulation books are arguably MORE valuable as training material because they contain information that is less likely to be duplicated across the ordinary web.

And 404 Media's reporting wasn't merely based on a bookseller's terminology of your "dead inventory". There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-que...

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rpdillon an hour ago | parent | next [-]

They are destroying books that they bought. It should not be controversial that part of ownership is decided how to dispose of the owned object.

But nothing you're citing adds up to "destroying the foundations of civilization". What we have instead is companies that are now paying to get copies of creative works (isn't this what everyone is complaining about with all the "theft" rhetoric?) so they can use them for training.

When they discuss scanning all the books in the world, they are not talking about every copy, since that makes no sense. They want one of each.

So, in the end, this all sounds like some breathless emotional take because large companies are buying copies of books and using them to train AI and throwing them away. They are probably destroying fewer books than the publishing houses do over the same time period.

This is like the water discussion: people with no understanding of agriculture (or publishing) hear a sound-bite about what AI is doing, and, with little-to-no context, devolve into a panic about it.

Again: cite real harm. What books aren't available? What knowledge was destroyed? There are real concerns about AI, but this whole discussion is a distraction.

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autoexec 31 minutes ago | parent [-]

> They are destroying books that they bought. It should not be controversial that part of ownership is decided how to dispose of the owned object.

By your reasoning, if I could afford to buy every surviving painting by Van Gogh and Rembrandt and I burned them in a bon fire I wouldn't be taking anything from human culture and nobody should care at all about what I do with my belongings.

Destroying something that is rare or one of a kind and valuable does matter. Doing it so that you can exclusively profit off of charging people for software that regurgitates lossy and error filled versions of what was lost makes it even worse.

	▲	jacquesm 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		More so because their digital copy increases in value because of the destruction.

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tbrownaw an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world"

If I do something destructive to my copy of Accelerate -- feed it through a scanner, leave it where the munchkin can reach, whatever -- that does nothing to deprive you of your copy. Books are funny like that; there tend to be lots of identical ones.