this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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[–] AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 14 points 3 months ago (10 children)

Not a fan of the fact they're doing this (obviously), given that I despise the waste and societal consequences AI companies are bringing upon us, but before anyone assumes they're just doing this for the sake of being evil or something like that:

Destructive Scanning is the cheapest and easiest to automate methods of scanning books. This is fairly common for any large-scale digitizing projects that aren't dealing with old, limited-in-supply books. (in this case, it's just books before 2022, which still likely have many copies in circulation)

They're also doing this to comply with court requirements for fair use. According to Ars Technica, a judge ruled that the destructive scanning qualified as fair use, only because Anthropic had spent the money to buy the books outright, destroyed them afterwards, and not distributed digital copies after.

The alternative is either Anthropic pirating the books (authors get paid $0), or buying the books, then distributing them back on the market through resellers (authors get paid the cost of the book, but then someone else buys the same copy secondhand and the author misses out on what would have otherwise been a fresh sale)

[–] skisnow@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 months ago (3 children)

The alternative is...

I mean there is one you missed out but ok

[–] AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)
[–] Steve@startrek.website 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 2 points 3 months ago

I mean... sure, but that's obviously not something that's just gonna forcibly happen (at least not soon), nor is it a decision they're gonna make on their own.

I was just describing the alternatives from the perspective that all the AI companies are trying to do things like this to compete with one another, so if they're going to get the data from these books one way or another, there's a limited set of ways that they can actually do that.

I'd love to see all these AI companies shut down, and the higher-ups responsible held accountable for intentionally destroying communities and the environment, as well as permanently poisoning online discourse and our ability to perceive what's real and what's not... but I just don't see that as something the system will allow to happen, at least not currently.

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