90. Anthropic is Destroying Rare Books to Train Their AI. Here’s How to Stop Them.
MEOW: A Literary Podcast for CatsShow Notes
Recent X posts are bringing awareness to Anthropic’s secret plan to dismantle millions of rare books in order to scan them into their LLMs. According to tech journalist Ole Lehmann, the process looks something like this: Since access to physical books can’t be logged by copyright holders, Anthropic has decided to purchase millions of used books and scan them into their private servers to create a high-quality knowledge base for its LLMs—without paying a penny in royalties or licensing fees.
They needed to work fast without getting caught. They deployed swarms of used-book buyers to snap up millions of titles, many of which were so obscure as to create inventory headaches for book dealers.
Still, they were able to acquire enough books to mass-scan between 500,000 and 2 million in six months.
To scan books at this speed, their spines needed to be removed and pages cut down to a size that could be fed en masse into high-speed scanners.
Once ingested, the original books were considered waste (more accurately, evidence), and discarded.
This practice not only gives Anthropic a de facto monopoly on huge swathes of accumulated human knowledge, but enables them to modify it as they see fit without fear of detection, as there is no longer any master copy to refer back to. Malicious intent aside, the scanning process and digital interpretation of the PDF scans is likely to be rife with errors, effectively building a Tower of Babel atop the smoldering pyre of their latter-day sack of Alexandria. To his credit, Elon Musk tweets, “I’ve asked the SpaceXAI team to preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way vs just cutting off the spine and scanning.” Could this be his unlikely route to becoming the champion of information access that his team’s bizarre mismanagement of X could never let him be? At The Meow Library, we’re not so sure. But we do have a way to disrupt Anthrophic’s scheme: flooding the market with used Meow Library titles. Big AI’s buyers will think they’re getting their hands on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, War and Peace, The Odyssey, or Wuthering Heights, but will only get hundreds of thousands of “meows.” Do your part by visiting The Meow Library today—and putting your copies on the secondhand market. This podcast is sustained by the continued bestselling status of The Meow Library’s Classics Collection.
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