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Let's get into it:
If AI is the future of human knowledge, why are AI companies destroying our past? Artificial intelligence companies are desperate to feed information to their large language models. They want to give them data not just in terms of basic information, but the mechanics of writing itself. The companies want the machines to have context in delivering information and answering questions, and competency in the way in which that delivery is done.
Anthropic has been quietly buying up books, rare books, out-of-print books, slicing off the bindings, scanning them, feeding them to AI, and destroying them. This is nothing less than the destruction of human knowledge, thought, history, skill, and ideas. And Anthropic doesn't want people to know about it, either. Going back to 2024, they said they didn't want the public to find out that they were engaged in the wholesale destruction of books.
Authors whose books were both used and destroyed in this process brought suit, and a judge said that Anthropic's destruction of the books was "fair use." The legal idea here is that the book is an object, and the owner of the object can use it however they please. The content, the judge argues, is not being replicated, so copyright is not being infringed. If Anthropic duplicated the book and then kept both the copy and the original, that would violate copyright, sayeth the judge.
But copyright law does not account for a circumstance like this, a circumstance in which thousands of books are being purchased wholesale and then destroyed. When Christian parents bought up the Harry Potter books and burned them over witchcraft fears, when heavy metal albums were burned for the same purpose, when Nazis took what they called degenerate art and destroyed it, when the Library of Alexandria was burned to the ground, humanity lamented. We declared that books are not meant to be destroyed but are held as a record of stories, thoughts, ideas, history, art, concepts, and quite literally anything else we can think of.
There is something so profane about turning over our records of humanity to a machine so that it can dismember it and feed it back to us in pieces without any context or authorship or understanding. These companies have decided that their need to train a software program to mimic human thought is more important, more essential to society than human thought itself.
As we watch our history, our records, our collective consciousness get destroyed only to be regurgitated back to us in tatters and confusion, we have to remember that we let this happen, we let our intelligence become nothing more than fodder so machines can larp as conscious without having any understanding or point of reference for what that is. The machine is not conscious. AI is the uncanny mask of humanity without anything at all behind it.
Libby