Anthropic’s ‘secret plan’ to ‘destructively scan all the books in the world' revealed by unredacted files
www.thebookseller.com
A number of newly unredacted (and partially redacted) documents from the Anthropic case have shed light on how executives at the tech giant ramped up plans in early 2024 to scan “all the books in the world” to teach their AI tool “how to write well”.

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.”

  • Bob Robertson IX @discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    16·
    4 days ago

    I’m not signing up with a random website to read their article but… what? “Destructively scan” books, as in they rip the book apart in order to scan it?

    I mean, if they paid the the books then they can do whatever they want with them. I don’t see the problem.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      161·
      4 days ago

      From the way the lawsuit documents tell it, Anthropic turned literally ripping off books into an art form. It used a “hydraulic powered cutting machine” to “neatly cut” the millions of books it got from used book retailers, and then scanned the pages “on high speed, high quality, production level scanners.” Then a recycling company would be scheduled to pick up the eviscerated volumes — because you wouldn’t want to be wasteful, after all.

      https://futurism.com/future-society/anthropic-destroying-books

      Because if you buy a physical product you have rights over that copy

      Digital, you don’t.

      So they pirated digital, got in trouble, then pivoted to the waste of buying scanning then making the scans searchable and readable for the AI.

      Like, destroying the books is a bad look, the waste of electricity just to circumvent copywriter law is the real bad part.

      • Grimy@lemmy.world
        4·
        3 days ago

        I don’t think there’s any difference between bought digital and physical media. It’s probably to avoid the extra junk the ToS add. I wouldn’t be surprised if most ebook shop stop you from bulk buying as well.

        • SaltSong@startrek.websiteEnglish
          3·
          3 days ago

          I don’t think there’s any difference between bought digital and physical media.

          Really? I don’t recall Amazon ever cooking into my house and taking my books back from me.

    • smh@slrpnk.net
      2·
      3 days ago

      “destructively scan” makes sense. It’s a PITA to scan books–their spines get in the way and the images are warped, so you have to do fancy image editing. You also have to turn the pages somehow.

      It’s much easier to cut off the spine, turn the book into a set of loose pages, and send it through a feed scanner

      That’s what we do at my school when we scan old yearbooks, if we have enough copies. We keep the loose pages around in a folder in case we need to rescan, but generally the quality is pretty good.