00:00AI companies have been accused of allegedly destroying folk loads of old
00:04and rare books in order to train their large language models. A copyright lawsuit
00:10brought against USA-based AI company Anthropic revealed that the company was
00:15engaging in a practice known as destructive scanning in order to train
00:19its large language model Claude. To scan the books most efficiently, the company
00:24has allegedly been slicing off the spines of physical books and pulping
00:29its pages afterwards. In some cases it's been reported that the destroyed books
00:34are among the last surviving copies of that original work. The lawsuit alleged
00:40that the project, known as Project Panama, was intended to be kept a secret from
00:45the public. According to internal memos seen during the court case, Anthropic
00:50employees and bosses described the project like this. What is Project Panama?
00:55Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the
01:00world. Why use a code name? Because we don't want it to be known that we're
01:05working on this. The judge ruled the AI companies had acted according to US
01:11copyright law because the scanning process amounted to a transformative use of the
01:16books. If the AI companies sought to teach their language models off existing
01:21digital works, for example via already scanned ebooks, the companies would have been
01:26required to secure copyright permissions from the tax owners. Rather than seek
01:32this permission, Anthropic originally chose to use pirated sources, a decision
01:38that costed the company 1.5 billion dollars in out-of-settlement costs to the
01:43authors. To avoid incurring the further legal costs, the company turned to the
01:48destructive method of book transformation. And in an ironic twist, the AI companies
01:54were forced to reveal that they were buying and hoarding large quantities of
01:58books, preferably created before 2022, to ensure the models were being trained on
02:04human thought, and to avoid cannibalizing the corrupting influence of any AI
02:10generated content in new works. Anthropic said it hoped that the book's well curated
02:15facts, well-organized analysis, and captivating fictional narratives would help Claude
02:21write as accurately and as compellingly as human authors. As always, the genius of
02:28human minds is still required.
