Get Off My Lawn

Random question, but, are, or were, Léa Desandre and Thomas Dunford ever a thing? I asked an AI and it was vague in its answer. Watching Thomas Dunford playing the lute watching Léa Desandre sing makes me believe they are very much a thing, but maybe I’m just a batty old gossip.*

Anyway, what use is the stupid AI if it can’t answer the questions that really matter? It only does things I don’t approve of, like cutting off the spines of books, ingesting their contents, and then dispatching them to the fiery furnace for their ruin and destruction. Several lovely readers sent me this utterly ghastly story:

According to the settled lawsuit, Anthropic used a hydraulic powered cutting machine to neatly remove the pages from the books it procured from book resellers and then scanned them using industrial-grade imaging equipment. In other words, it was literally ripping off authors’ books to train its AI.

This process took advantage of a legal concept known as first-sale doctrine, which allows a buyer to do what they want with a purchase without the original copyright holder’s say-so. And since Anthropic was turning the original physical texts into digital ones — rather than redistributing them as new copies — a judge found this to be “transformative,” and therefore protected by fair use.

I feel like the word “neatly” is doing all the heavy hydraulic work in this reporting. From all I’ve heard, the guillotine “neatly” removed the heads off of their owners during the French Revolution, but that’s not the word you would naturally reach for if you thought about it for even one or two nanoseconds.

Apparently, some actual booksellers who, my goodness, ought to know better, are trying to “cash in” on this blasphemy:

Now, as 404 Media reports, this practice has become prevalent enough that even well-established book sellers are looking to cash in on the AI boom. One called ISBNdb, which boasts the “world’s largest book database,” extolls that the “world’s best AI training data is setting on a shelf,” upholding these physical texts as uncorrupted by shoddy AI writing that’s already polluted so much of the internet (and indeed, newer books).

There are video clips available of the big metal blade chopping the spines off of books that look like they would have continued on quietly existing on a bookcase, or strewn about in comforting heaps upon the floor next to some thinking person’s bed, for another seven centuries at least. If you search for clips of the spine removals, a demon will find them and show them to you. Personally, I cannot even bare to cut in a link.

Imagine working in a place like that—pushing the button to make the machine go, ordering the faceless robots to clean up all the dust, firing up the furnace to destroy all the evidence. I suppose, technically, it is not as wicked as killing people, but it is adjacent to the murder of people, for people wrote the words and took the trouble shove them into the books. Taking the words and amassing them in some spiritually brutalist technological edifice and calling it “transformative” is technically correct (sorry—couldn’t resist an early morning pun). It’s just the wrong sort of transformation. It violates the point of having books, of being able to hold a discrete object in one’s hands in which abides the thoughts and words of another.

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