Do you like books? As someone who runs our museum’s Research Library and also has a day job at a university library, I definitely like books. Which is why this report by Futurism from over the past weekend is so infuriating.
It seems AI companies – yes, even Anthropic, “the good one” – are running out of reliable digital information to train their models on, so now they’re buying up rare books in bulk, tearing them apart to scan them, and then pulping them in order to claim “transformative” use of the materials, which a US judge has accepted as evidence of fair use under copyright law (as part of the lawsuit Anthropic lost last week for which they now owe US$1.5 billion for pirating digital books to train their Claude bot).
Add it to the list of “what could possibly go wrong?” things that AI companies are doing to the rest of us.
If, like me, you need something to help you temporarily forget the insanity of the above, why not watch three minutes of Carl Sagan talking about why books are magical: