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If we ignore the massive amount of books being destroyed, the outages and increased usage bills for once free websites (some resulting in closure), the increase

If we ignore the massive amount of books being destroyed, the outages and increased usage bills for once free websites (some resulting in closure), the increased difficulty to access public information such as Reddit and Twitter, and lastly ignore the amount of conversations being taken away from the public in favor of LLMs, I would agree.

skarz 10d ago
Except books are already destroyed in physical form every single day. My local library has a section near the front for free and/or extremely cheap books ($1) they are desperately trying to get rid of. My impression is that if they are untaken/unsold they will end up in a dumpster. [Edit] Here's an article from 2003 talking about how Random House destroyed up to 25,000 books a day: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/19/fiction.stephenmoss https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/19/fiction.stephe...
- lenkite 10d ago
  The scale is completely different. It is like comparing a tiny ant to a Star Devouring Shoggoth. Anthropic destroyed millions of books in hardly any time. They are destroying the foundations of civilization https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
  - rpdillon 10d ago
    > They are destroying the foundations of civilization No, they are not. For all the hype around that 404 media article, no one came forward with titles or authors. Turns out the booksellers that sold them those books said they were "dead inventory". If you're going to assert that companies are destroying the foundations of civilization, you're going to have to produce quite a bit more evidence than the (poorly cited) 404 Media article.
    - lenkite 10d ago
      Evidence ? Good lord, how about the US district court of justice ? Anthropic physically destroyed millions of books after scanning them - are you really, truly questioning that ? Here is what was signed by Judge Alsup at https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/candce/3%3A2024cv05417/434709/ https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califo... > Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase MILLIONS of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals. Dismissing the above as "dead inventory" is atrocious reasoning. The more obscure/low-circulation books are arguably MORE valuable as training material because they contain information that is less likely to be duplicated across the ordinary web. And 404 Media's reporting wasn't merely based on a bookseller's terminology of your "dead inventory". There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world" https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-quest-to-destructively-scan-all-the-worlds-books/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-que...
      - rpdillon 10d ago
        They are destroying books that they bought. It should not be controversial that part of ownership is decided how to dispose of the owned object. But nothing you're citing adds up to "destroying the foundations of civilization". What we have instead is companies that are now paying to get copies of creative works (isn't this what everyone is complaining about with all the "theft" rhetoric?) so they can use them for training. When they discuss scanning all the books in the world, they are not talking about every copy, since that makes no sense. They want one of each. So, in the end, this all sounds like some breathless emotional take because large companies are buying copies of books and using them to train AI and throwing them away. They are probably destroying fewer books than the publishing houses do over the same time period. This is like the water discussion: people with no understanding of agriculture (or publishing) hear a sound-bite about what AI is doing, and, with little-to-no context, devolve into a panic about it. Again: cite real harm. What books aren't available? What knowledge was destroyed? There are real concerns about AI, but this whole discussion is a distraction.
TeMPOraL 10d ago
> the massive amount of books being destroyed Surely that's not about AI? Or you mean the small fraction of that that's result of "destructive format shift" process[0], which itself is a consequence of copyright regulation that would otherwise prevent anyone from accessing these works? > the outages and increased usage bills for once free websites (some resulting in closure) That's assumed to be AI companies for some reason, even if they have no real incentive to do that, while the usual business underbelly of people scraping web for whatever reasons (which now may include some AI upstart wannabies too, to be fair) is forgotten about. Not helping is people confusing AI agents acting as user-agents and doing one-off fetches with "AI scrappers". > the increased difficulty to access public information such as Reddit and Twitter It was never public, and they started locking down before AI, when both platforms (as well as all other social media platforms) run out of VC subsidsies and realized they need to start monetizing; first step they did was to wage a war on third-party clients and API users. AI came later. > ignore the amount of conversations being taken away from the public in favor of LLMs You mean human agency? Like, humans deciding it's better for them to ask a machine instead of posting questions online? I can understand that, it's usually much better experience (particularly on sites like StackOverflow - they dug their own grave here, and they know it; there have been memes about this way before LLMs were a thing). You're also not considering the amount of questions answered that would not have been asked otherwise. I for one don't ask many questions on-line, so anything I ask LLMs that they solve for me, is a question that would've remained unanswered for me otherwise. Not everyone is gregarious online, many people are more self-reliant and only answer questions, but solve their own problems without asking for help (it's probably not optimal thing to do, but that's another topic). -- [0] - Digitizing and retaining physical copy is clear infringement, digitizing but destroying the physical original can be argued to be fair use.
- watwut 10d ago
  > You mean human agency? Like, humans deciding it's better for them to ask a machine instead of posting questions online? Oh, please, AI is single most hated technology to the level we did not seen before. And that is after staggering propaganda going out of these CEO that hiding behind human agency is beyond lie. It was pushed on us, whether we like it or not, because people with a lot of money are the only ones who matter. And people with a lot of money have that weird cult belief in emerging AI god and singularity, so they dont care what they destroy in the process.
ch4s3 10d ago
Your talking about a bunch of books that are out of print and sat unsold for years in a warehouse somewhere. The rights holders could print another run tomorrow if they wanted, or better yet digitize them but they don’t. Where’s your ire for the rights holders who sit on these books and don’t do anything with the ?
- shimman 10d ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 10d ago
    [deleted]
  - BeetleB 10d ago
    They legally bought the books they are destroying. I have every right to burn all the books I possess. And so should they.
    - shimman 10d ago
      [flagged]
      - BeetleB 10d ago
        They have no more right to destroy cultural artifacts than you do. It's a red herring, as no one has demonstrated a single loss of a cultural artifact. What was destroyed, that satisfies: 1. You cannot obtain elsewhere 2. That anyone cares about Destroying a copy of a Harry Potter is not a loss of a cultural artifact if I can still buy the book at a store. Go ahead and start a campaign: For all who are upset by this, list your physical address, and tell everyone to mail their unwanted books to those on the list instead of destroying them. The catch is the recipients are not allowed to destroy them. Then we'll see how much those complaining value culture.
    - GuinansEyebrows 10d ago
      the argument of some hypothetical "right to burn all the books i possess" is not really the topic of discussion here. it's not a "can" argument, it's a "should" argument.
internet101010 10d ago
Eh, StackOverflow deserved to go.
BeetleB 10d ago
Most of these things are bad. None of them is robbery, though. Some are of questionable legality, but most are not. People need to face reality. The old Internet was fragile and couldn't have lasted long. It was dying slowly due to closed social media and LLMs are accelerating that death. I'd rather it die quickly and be replaced by something more robust than decay slowly. I was sick of how it was before LLMs even came among.

skarz 10d ago

Except books are already destroyed in physical form every single day. My local library has a section near the front for free and/or extremely cheap books ($1) they are desperately trying to get rid of. My impression is that if they are untaken/unsold they will end up in a dumpster. [Edit] Here's an article from 2003 talking about how Random House destroyed up to 25,000 books a day: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/19/fiction.stephenmoss https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/19/fiction.stephe...

lenkite 10d ago
The scale is completely different. It is like comparing a tiny ant to a Star Devouring Shoggoth. Anthropic destroyed millions of books in hardly any time. They are destroying the foundations of civilization https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
- rpdillon 10d ago
  > They are destroying the foundations of civilization No, they are not. For all the hype around that 404 media article, no one came forward with titles or authors. Turns out the booksellers that sold them those books said they were "dead inventory". If you're going to assert that companies are destroying the foundations of civilization, you're going to have to produce quite a bit more evidence than the (poorly cited) 404 Media article.
  - lenkite 10d ago
    Evidence ? Good lord, how about the US district court of justice ? Anthropic physically destroyed millions of books after scanning them - are you really, truly questioning that ? Here is what was signed by Judge Alsup at https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/candce/3%3A2024cv05417/434709/ https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califo... > Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase MILLIONS of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals. Dismissing the above as "dead inventory" is atrocious reasoning. The more obscure/low-circulation books are arguably MORE valuable as training material because they contain information that is less likely to be duplicated across the ordinary web. And 404 Media's reporting wasn't merely based on a bookseller's terminology of your "dead inventory". There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world" https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-quest-to-destructively-scan-all-the-worlds-books/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-que...
    - rpdillon 10d ago
      They are destroying books that they bought. It should not be controversial that part of ownership is decided how to dispose of the owned object. But nothing you're citing adds up to "destroying the foundations of civilization". What we have instead is companies that are now paying to get copies of creative works (isn't this what everyone is complaining about with all the "theft" rhetoric?) so they can use them for training. When they discuss scanning all the books in the world, they are not talking about every copy, since that makes no sense. They want one of each. So, in the end, this all sounds like some breathless emotional take because large companies are buying copies of books and using them to train AI and throwing them away. They are probably destroying fewer books than the publishing houses do over the same time period. This is like the water discussion: people with no understanding of agriculture (or publishing) hear a sound-bite about what AI is doing, and, with little-to-no context, devolve into a panic about it. Again: cite real harm. What books aren't available? What knowledge was destroyed? There are real concerns about AI, but this whole discussion is a distraction.

TeMPOraL 10d ago

> the massive amount of books being destroyed Surely that's not about AI? Or you mean the small fraction of that that's result of "destructive format shift" process[0], which itself is a consequence of copyright regulation that would otherwise prevent anyone from accessing these works? > the outages and increased usage bills for once free websites (some resulting in closure) That's assumed to be AI companies for some reason, even if they have no real incentive to do that, while the usual business underbelly of people scraping web for whatever reasons (which now may include some AI upstart wannabies too, to be fair) is forgotten about. Not helping is people confusing AI agents acting as user-agents and doing one-off fetches with "AI scrappers". > the increased difficulty to access public information such as Reddit and Twitter It was never public, and they started locking down before AI, when both platforms (as well as all other social media platforms) run out of VC subsidsies and realized they need to start monetizing; first step they did was to wage a war on third-party clients and API users. AI came later. > ignore the amount of conversations being taken away from the public in favor of LLMs You mean human agency? Like, humans deciding it's better for them to ask a machine instead of posting questions online? I can understand that, it's usually much better experience (particularly on sites like StackOverflow - they dug their own grave here, and they know it; there have been memes about this way before LLMs were a thing). You're also not considering the amount of questions answered that would not have been asked otherwise. I for one don't ask many questions on-line, so anything I ask LLMs that they solve for me, is a question that would've remained unanswered for me otherwise. Not everyone is gregarious online, many people are more self-reliant and only answer questions, but solve their own problems without asking for help (it's probably not optimal thing to do, but that's another topic). -- [0] - Digitizing and retaining physical copy is clear infringement, digitizing but destroying the physical original can be argued to be fair use.

watwut 10d ago
> You mean human agency? Like, humans deciding it's better for them to ask a machine instead of posting questions online? Oh, please, AI is single most hated technology to the level we did not seen before. And that is after staggering propaganda going out of these CEO that hiding behind human agency is beyond lie. It was pushed on us, whether we like it or not, because people with a lot of money are the only ones who matter. And people with a lot of money have that weird cult belief in emerging AI god and singularity, so they dont care what they destroy in the process.

ch4s3 10d ago

Your talking about a bunch of books that are out of print and sat unsold for years in a warehouse somewhere. The rights holders could print another run tomorrow if they wanted, or better yet digitize them but they don’t. Where’s your ire for the rights holders who sit on these books and don’t do anything with the ?

shimman 10d ago
[flagged]
- deleted 10d ago
  [deleted]
- BeetleB 10d ago
  They legally bought the books they are destroying. I have every right to burn all the books I possess. And so should they.
  - shimman 10d ago
    [flagged]
    - BeetleB 10d ago
      They have no more right to destroy cultural artifacts than you do. It's a red herring, as no one has demonstrated a single loss of a cultural artifact. What was destroyed, that satisfies: 1. You cannot obtain elsewhere 2. That anyone cares about Destroying a copy of a Harry Potter is not a loss of a cultural artifact if I can still buy the book at a store. Go ahead and start a campaign: For all who are upset by this, list your physical address, and tell everyone to mail their unwanted books to those on the list instead of destroying them. The catch is the recipients are not allowed to destroy them. Then we'll see how much those complaining value culture.
  - GuinansEyebrows 10d ago
    the argument of some hypothetical "right to burn all the books i possess" is not really the topic of discussion here. it's not a "can" argument, it's a "should" argument.

internet101010 10d ago

Eh, StackOverflow deserved to go.

BeetleB 10d ago

Most of these things are bad. None of them is robbery, though. Some are of questionable legality, but most are not. People need to face reality. The old Internet was fragile and couldn't have lasted long. It was dying slowly due to closed social media and LLMs are accelerating that death. I'd rather it die quickly and be replaced by something more robust than decay slowly. I was sick of how it was before LLMs even came among.