AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
A volunteer from Anna's Archive alleges that AI companies are purchasing, scanning, and destroying physical books to create proprietary training datasets. The group is calling for global volunteers to digitize rare books to prevent the monopolization of human knowledge.
Why it matters
This raises significant ethical and cultural concerns regarding the preservation of public knowledge versus the commercial interests of AI development.
A guest post by Anna’s Archive volunteer “u” (translated from Chinese).
TL;DR: AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train their models, permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers. Anna’s Archive is urgently calling on volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books before this cultural heritage disappears forever.
Several AI companies are acquiring large quantities of secondhand books through intermediaries, scanning and destroying them, all to obtain training data “untouched by machines” from before 2022.
Anthropic’s “Project Panama” was exposed in a $1.5 billion copyright settlement. In early 2024, they launched this highly confidential project. The company has spent tens of millions of dollars purchasing millions of paper books, scanning them, training its Claude LLM, and then destroying them all. It’s outrageous is that it’s legally permissible, but ethically, it’s an extremely serious crime against humanity.
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