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AI Companies Destroying Millions of Books for Training Data

Yahoo1 min brief

In brief

  • AI companies are destroying millions of physical books to use for training data.
  • They scan the books and then discard them.
    • This matters because the books are a valuable source of human-authored text.
  • The AI companies need this text to improve their models.
  • One company, Anthropic, was sued for copyright infringement and paid a $1.5 billion settlement.
  • The AI companies are now hiring middlemen to buy the books for them.
  • They want to keep their involvement a secret because they know it is not popular.
  • The demand for human-authored text will continue to drive the destruction of physical books.

Terms in this brief

Anthropic
A company known for developing advanced AI systems, including the AI model Claude. They faced legal issues related to using copyrighted material for training their models.

Read full story at Yahoo

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