Let the Books Exist

I've always loved books. I've never really thought about it much; I don't even own a small library or anything like it... just a few books, but some of them are older editions or vintage chess books. They're just there. I don't read them every day or even every year, but there is a certain joy in looking at them sitting on their shelves or, in the case of the vintage books, in their cabinet, and the thought that someone would scan them, feed them into a dataset to train AI and then discard them like trash made my skin crawl for reasons that are hard to explain... because I also love AI.

This morning I came across a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) that reported the destruction of hundreds of thousands, potentially millions, of books. The post focused primarily on the AI company Anthropic. They had something called "Project Panama" going on, which involved bulk-buying books, cutting the spines off with a "hydraulic-powered cutting machine" and scanning them to train their LLM "Claude." The books were then destroyed, recycled, pulped, shredded... whatever we want to call it. And that is exactly what I personally find problematic. Let the AIs train on those books, but don't destroy them. Scan them in old-fashioned ways and donate them to libraries or collections. Let the books exist!

The argument that it's about the knowledge those books carry and not about the paper is fair, but it's also a tell that people who say that never had much interest in books to begin with.
If those people can't appreciate that books have a certain smell, a certain weight and texture and maybe also coffee stains, handwritten notes in the margins or annotations and additions, then they are maybe not the ones who should decide what happens to the books.

The copyright theater isn't something I concern myself with, but a court ruling has treated this practice as "fair use." So legally, it's allowed. Morally, however, it still feels like a modern form of knowledge destruction.

I couldn’t care less about one copy among hundreds of thousands of a romance novel or other mass-market copies, but I do care about the last three copies of a private publication. I care about local histories and rare editions, art books and personal memoirs.

Maybe we should rethink our stance on such precious and rare, but not necessarily financially valuable, writings.

History has never looked kindly upon those who burned books, literally or otherwise. So let AI read the books, but let the books exist.

Sources

• The Washington Post
• X (formerly Twitter)
• The Authors Guild: court order in Bartz v. Anthropic