AI companies are buying rare books to steal their contents, then pulping them; that’s according to widespread reports in recent months. It’s become a growing concern among both book lovers and those who worry about the destructive practices of the AI industry.
Add U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) to their ranks.
"AI companies are literally buying up millions of books, often buying the only copy or the only handful of copies of human-created books, feeding them into their model, and then destroying the books so no one can see the evidence of how they trained the model," Murphy said in a recent video posted to social media.
“Part of the agenda here is for the AI companies to destroy as much purely human-created work as they can, in part so that you don’t remember what it looks like or what it sounds like. So that you’ll never be able to distinguish between the AI-created content and the human-created content.”
Murphy specifically called out Anthropic, whose ‘Project Panama’ was meant to be secret until it was disclosed in a court case earlier this year.
According to court documents, they turned to scanning and destroying books after refusing to secure copyright permission, then faced a $1.5 billion settlement when they pirated the books instead.
