Should we destroy all the books in the world?<\/p>\n
An answer to this question can be found in the court documents of Bartz v Anthropic PBC. The northern California district court case, decided in late July this year, highlighted the improbably named \u201cProject Panama\u201d, one of the AI company Anthropic\u2019s efforts to improve its large language model Claude. \u201cWhat is Project Panama?\u201d court exhibit 21<\/a> asks, in an internal memo. The answer: \u201cProject Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.\u201d The memo advises discretion: \u201cWhy use a codename? \u2026 [B]ecause we don\u2019t want it to be known that we are working on this.\u201d<\/p>\n Destructive scanning was Anthropic\u2019s solution to a problem: in order to \u201ctrain\u201d Claude, Anthropic had to procure a large, high-quality language dataset, preferably one created before 2022<\/a> and the corrupting influence of generative AI on contemporary text. Claude needed as many language combinations as possible, to improve its ability to predict language outcomes. Anthropic needed data, lots of it, of very high quality. Books, as it happens, remain one of the best sources for complex, high-quality, long-form text. As the court\u2019s decision<\/a> relates, Anthropic hoped that books\u2019 \u201cwell-curated facts, well-organized analyses, and captivating fictional narratives\u201d would help \u201cClaude write as accurately and as compellingly as Authors\u201d.<\/p>\n Anthropic had a choice: it could have secured copyright permission to use existing e-books. This would have required the \u201clegal\/practice\/business slog\u201d, as Anthropic\u2019s co-founder and CEO phrased it<\/a>, of managing copyright. Rather than engage with the texts\u2019 owners, Anthropic first chose to use pirated sources instead, a decision informing the company\u2019s $1.5bn out-of-court settlement<\/a> with authors. When that approach seemed too complicated (or, as the court decision phrases: \u201cAnthropic became \u2018not so gung ho about\u2019 training on pirated books \u2018for legal reasons\u2019\u201d), Anthropic turned to destructive scanning. As it happened, the judge ruled that using proprietary material to \u201ctrain\u201d an LLM did not, in and of itself, constitute an infringement of copyright. To the court, it would seem, \u201ctraining\u201d a corporate product is equivalent to training any human, teaching how to read in order to learn how to write.<\/p>\n Should we be surprised that destroying printed texts seemed easier to Anthropic than working with their human authors? Either way, the decision to use destructive scanning turned the issue into one of logistics. Under US copyright law, the \u201cfair use\u201d doctrine allows you to make \u201ctransformative\u201d use of copyrighted works without the owner\u2019s permission. Anthropic took printed books and scanned them, \u201ctransforming\u201d or remediating them into a new, electronic format. They then disposed of the original printed copy: the \u201cdestructive\u201d part of destructive scanning. Along the way, Anthropic\u2019s vendors had already sliced the spines and edges of the books<\/a>, to scan them more easily before destroying them. \u201cOne replaced the other,\u201d as Judge William Alsup wrote, noting<\/a>: \u201cThere is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthropic hired an experienced logistics manager, sourced the books from vendors, hired staff and housed the books in a warehouse, and found a digitization vendor to take on the project of the destructive scanning itself. The case exhibits show warehouses of books neatly stacked and labelled on shelves, staff moving between them. As the court\u2019s decision relates<\/a>, Anthropic\u2019s vendors \u201cstripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form \u2013 discarding the paper originals\u201d. In the court\u2019s images, stacks of books await destructive scanning. Not seen: the clean-up project of shredding and disposing of the books (or, \u201call the books in the world\u201d, reformatted as recycling or landfill).<\/p>\n Bookishness<\/a>, or the range of meanings attached to the book as cultural object<\/a>, has always lived alongside the book\u2019s role as textual instrument. Witness the example of images<\/a> of Donald Trump, holding up a copy of the Bible at St John\u2019s during the protests of 1 June 2020. Yet unlike many other countries, the US has very few legal provisions relating to the regulation or export of American cultural heritage, and few to none governing the treatment of books.<\/p>\n