LARGO, Fla. \u2014 A Largo bookstore owner is raising concerns about destructive scanning after a recent $1.5 billion settlement between authors and the AI company Anthropic.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit drew attention to how some physical books are used to train artificial intelligence models.<\/p>\n
The settlement focused on Anthropic\u2019s use of pirated e-books to train its AI models.<\/p>\n
Another part of the case addressed the practice of buying books, tearing off their bindings, scanning the pages, and throwing the books away.<\/p>\n
That process is known as destructive scanning and was ruled legal under fair use standards.<\/p>\n
At The Book Rescuers in Largo, owner George Brooks said he recently read about destructive scanning and is against the practice.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo do that with a book, to get data out of it and then to just toss it is an utter disregard for what the book is actually intended for,\u201d Brooks said.<\/p>\n
In the California case Bartz v. Anthropic, the judge wrote in the introduction of the order on fair use that the company \u201cpurchased copyrighted books … tore off the bindings, scanned every page, and stored them in digitized, searchable files.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alexis Ramsey-Tobienne, assistant dean for artificial intelligence at Eckerd College, said AI systems learn from many sources, including material they generate themselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI is kind of learning from itself. It\u2019s learning, it\u2019s getting trained on the files, some of which are the outputs that it itself has created,\u201d Ramsey-Tobienne said.<\/p>\n
Ramsey-Tobienne said large language models need new material to continue developing, and not all books are available online. That makes physical books a potential training resource.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs we keep using them, they need to keep learning. So they\u2019re turning to these \u2018new sources\u2019 that they haven\u2019t scanned before,\u201d Ramsey-Tobienne said.<\/p>\n
Anthropic declined an interview request and sent a statement saying its AI software service, Claude, \u201cis trained on a mix of publicly available web data, commercially acquired datasets, and data we generate ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNone of our data acquisition programs buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books,\u201d the company said.<\/p>\n
The issue has also circulated on social media, where some influencers have used a video Brooks posted to TikTok three years ago. Brooks said the video does not show destructive scanning. Instead, it shows how The Book Rescuers repurposes books that are beyond repair.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is over 100-year-old paper. Look at the colors of that. You\u2019re not going to get that again. Someone would love to have this, and someone would have probably enjoyed the entire book,\u201d Brooks said.<\/p>\n
Brooks said he did not know influencers were using his video to describe destructive scanning until he was asked about it. He said The Book Rescuers uses covers as canvases and old pages for crafting when books cannot be rehomed.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven though the books couldn\u2019t be rehomed, filling up landfills with them didn\u2019t make sense either,\u201d Brooks said.<\/p>\n
In the Bartz v. Anthropic lawsuit conclusion, the judge ruled that training AI from books is fair use. However, the court did not treat pirated library copies as training copies, which is where the $1.5 billion settlement stems from.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LARGO, Fla. \u2014 A Largo bookstore owner is raising concerns about destructive scanning after a recent $1.5 billion…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":146607,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,49840,66,6887,69211,6284],"class_list":["post-146606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-matt-lackritz","tag-news","tag-orlando","tag-pinellas-county","tag-tampa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146606\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}