Some AI bro made a huge order (200+ €) of rare italian books at full price with the purpose of destroying them in order to train some model
In the beginning he was puzzled why some american would want to spend hundreds of dollars to import discontinued books on mostly religious topics (a real human would never buy this stuff, it's ultraniche and expensive), then we connected the dots.
And we've finally come to the point I was trying to make from the beginning. In this particular case it's Copyright law that is bad.
For example. I have a collection of physical cookbooks that I am in the process of digitizing because I would like to have them in my self hosted Mealie server, and many of them are old and delicate so this is the only way to protect their contents.
Many of these books are rare, no longer in print, and have no digital editions. Now I have a bit more leeway in my case because the recipes themselves are not subject to copyright (only the compilation), but still the only fully legal way for me to digitize these books is to destroy them after I've scanned them.
This is a problem with copyright and the commercialization of knowledge in general, not something that is specific to Anthropic or any AI company. So the point is, if you want to rage out at something, make sure your ire is targeted in the correct direction.
In this case that direction should be towards reforming copyright law, and establishing broader adaptation of the copyleft philosophy (which I very much support).
And just to clarify, yes Anthropic destroying a bunch of books is less than ideal, and you can argue that the reason they want them in the first place is dumb or evil as well, but the actual act of destruction is being compelled by US law and applies to anyone in any similar situation.