People living in history's most time of widespread and open access to information worrying about someone "destroying all the books" is like someone worrying about mars getting too overpopulated.

If there's any organization who'd purposefully burn books so people can't access them it is probably the publishers and the writer's guild. The last time evil tech-bros tried scanning books for public access they freaked the fuck out and forced them to keep them private.

The books were probably headed to disposal anyways, probably a net good that they were given one last useful purpose before their end bsky.app/profile/aure...

Mmmm I don’t know that they were headed to disposal, they’re just books sitting around in various bookseller warehouses I think. The buying/shredding might be fairly indiscriminate.

Today on Bluesky I read dozens of people decry copyright infringement and demand Anthropic publish all their scans in the same breath

People are all wound up and frothing. It’s super insane.

DON'T LET CLAUDE READ THAT

“That was a copy of the Proceedings of the Castilian Society of Agronomists I was going to share with my children…”

If you talk to anybody who's ever done any archive work whatsoever, they'll tell you that only a tiny fraction of books have been digitized—but for hard copies, they don't exist. So I'm not sanguine abt trashing hard copies that have been scanned but not digitally archived*.

"If it were important, it'd already be digitized" is laughable. "If it were important, it'd already be in a library" only somewhat less so. *if each one goes DRM-free into the LOC or whatever, I agree it's nbd. But that's not my understanding of the practice

You or I can put data libgen or slsk, but Anthropic would be ruined for gifting the knowledge they have to the world. It's less satanic panic and more maleficarum imo, this is the next stage of what Guttenberg started and the first round gave us ~400yrs of hysteria and shite books taken as gospel

I guess they don't believe that training consists of copying works in any meaningful or reproducible way when it comes down to it. otherwise that would be a form of mass reproduction rather than hiding

Or maybe they only believe it on say Wednesdays, or when an instagram influencer says so

I don’t think the mainstream complaint is that it’s a plot to hide info, I think the complaint is that destroying the books comes from a place of generally having no respect or regard for humanity’s cultural patrimony.

I’ve heard it both ways. One is stupider than the other. The “no respect” one is harder to argue because, you know, they demonstrably do have little respect. But this really is the only legal option, and we have no one but the US to blame for that.