Companies like IA are buying, digitizing, and then destroying old books
anthropic claude training
| Source: Mastodon | Original article
AI firms buy, digitize, and destroy old books for training. This practice gives them exclusive content ownership.
Canadian company Zoom Books is buying older books for American and Canadian AI corporations, digitizing them for "AI training," and then destroying the physical copies. This practice, also employed by Anthropic for its AI model Claude, raises concerns about the exclusive ownership of the content and the loss of physical books.
As we previously reported, Anthropic's methods for training its AI model have been controversial, with the company cutting up and digitizing millions of books before discarding the originals. The legality of this practice has been upheld by an American judge, who ruled that a startup can train its AI model on digitized copies of physical books without the authors' permission.
What happens next will be crucial, as lawmakers and the public weigh in on the ethics of destroying physical books for AI training, and the implications for the ownership and preservation of literary works.
Sources
Back to AIPULSEN