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Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[–] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I think it’s a waste tbh. Like it’s one of those capitalist things of “well its not profitable to sell so lets destroy them”, when anything made for the good of the people would’ve seen a massive opportunity to distribute books to people for free!

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Copyright law doesn't allow them to sell the books. It's almost certainly a violation to scan books for their content and then sell them.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Copyright law also doesn’t allow them to download the entirety of a piracy database of books. But here we are, they clearly don’t care about copyright law.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    They didn't care at first. The only reason they began destructively scanning books is because they started to care about copyright law:

    Anthropic first chose to amass digitized versions of pirated books to avoid what CEO Dario Amodei called "legal/practice/business slog"—the complex licensing negotiations with publishers. But by 2024, Anthropic had become "not so gung ho about" using pirated ebooks "for legal reasons" and needed a safer source.

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