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.”
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.
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…
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?
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.
“…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.
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.
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 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.
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.
