AI burns books? Tech giants are buying, shredding books to train smarter chatbots
AI Tech giants have been working on a secret project to buy millions of books and destroy them to feed their new models.
AI companies are buying and then destroying millions of rare books to train AI models and prevent "slop" content. Tech giants, such as Anthropic, are paying contractors to buy rare books, which are then scanned and shredded. In a prior case, Anthropic settled a class action lawsuit with authors after being accused of using pirated versions of their books to teach the chatbot Claude AI.
Despite the destruction of physical books, Anthropic's use of the digital copies was deemed fair use in a court ruling. Critics argue that the legal precedent now rewards destruction while penalizing the preservation of books. Some tech giants, like Elon Musk, have criticized the practice of destroying books.
Written by urgent.news from Jerusalem Post Tech & Start-Ups's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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