Dario Amodei looks as if he can smell what he’s saying.
He’s a fucking lunatic.
I am pretty sure this was in the news a few years ago and even then it was a nothing burger.
There are many and many things to rightly criticize ai companies for but to Summarize what this is about.
Anthropric buys book using real money. (Not fake ai credits like how “compute” often gets bought)
Meaning the books are now anthropics property… right?
They then destroy the cover/binding. So they can scan the individual pages easier.
I assume with no further use to the pages it all got discarded after scanning.
… that is the story.
Is it economically inefficient and wasteful? Yes. Does it feel wrong? Yes.
Should journalism instead focus on how the text data is used in context of the ai/copyright problem. Yes
Is it wrong to destroy an object that you own because it the easiest way to accomplish your project? No, that would be silly.
I am guilty myself.
I have destroyed a book in art class, My entire class did, to be made in a box, i did not even read or scan its content to save any of it. If every student of this old teacher had ever this assignment… that is a lot of books over a career.
I have destroyed generic cheap tools to make more specialized single use tools.
Is it wrong to destroy an object that you own because it the easiest way to accomplish your project? No, that would be silly.
lol what. Yes, it can be wrong. Such as destroying books in pursuit of a shit goal.
They specifically seek out rare books that aren’t in the digital domain yet, but destroy them. Effectively taking a renewed copyright on already out of copyright material.
If they put them into an advice of sorts that would benefit more people there would be a since looking, but they actively destroy the knowledge for everyone but themselves. The same way they have sucked dry every digital volume.
Luckily some sellers do boycott these organisations.
How about journalism foocusses on those other things AND this too as it is still wasteful as fuck and just morally wrong
They were destroying rare books, including first editions. Once the book is digitized and the original book is destroyed, the original text can no longer be verified. Nefarious actors are now able rewrite the past by making changes to the digital version of the book.
I think the bigger issue there is they bought unique or even one of a kind copies. Now they have that unique reproduction in their DB and unless they plan on opening it up to the public for free, it’s just there.
Is this similar to them having the book and not doing anything with it? Somewhat, though IMO on some level there’s something worse about taking something, digitizing for easier distribution and then locking it behind a chatbot.
42nd St library in Manhattan had a machine that would scan books without damaging them because they were books people could use at the library.
What Dario is doing is destroying a source generation with the vision his AI becomes the source easier to use than books.
Disappointed no one like blew the whistle earlier or sabotaged the operation. A lot of people had to know about this.
Makes you wonder what kind of crap they’re doing now that we’ll find out years later
