AI companies are burning books, advocates complain to FTC
ai and ml
Fahrenheit 203, the temperature GPUs stop gorging on literature
AI companies are buying loads of physical books, hoovering up the texts for model training, and then physically destroying the originals. A group of 18 advocacy organizations on Friday asked the US Federal Trade Commission to investigate the book butchering and knowledge hoarding.
Fresh details of the practice emerged earlier this year via document disclosures in Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, a copyright case brought by authors of books that the AI company used for training without permission.
Anthropic's book scan-and-destroy operation was known as "Project Panama." It was described in a 2024 internal memo as "our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world."
Anthropic gave the operation a codename "because we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this," the court exhibit explains. "This document is visible to all Anthropic...
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