Thread

Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'

955 points · 841 comments · pluc

jacquesm · 1789726316 · focus · HN ↗
It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.
It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime, so it should be no surprise that the most valuable companies on the planet will most likely result from this crime. And given that justice can be bought by those with the most money you can forget about anything coming of this.
1. TeMPOraL · 1789734845 · focus · HN ↗
  > It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up.
  Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form. This rhetoric sounds impressive, but really looks more like "piracy is theft" line from early 2000s, similarly flawed in basic premise.
  Whether the end result threatens the form in which culture is created, at least beyond just threatening the business models of the gatekeepers, is a separate discussion, but you can't draw the heart-string-pulling "life's work got appropriated" arguments there so easily.
  And let's not forget what we got back for this: reified intelligence on a chip almost too cheap to meter, available to everyone across the world - not just rich West, inference is so dirt cheap that whole world uses it. It exploded in popularity organically, because of how many real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits, it addresses.
  There's plenty to hate about how AI is transforming the world, but one thing it's not, is "robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up".
  1. MattDaEskimo · 1789737692 · focus · HN ↗
    If we ignore the massive amount of books being destroyed, the outages and increased usage bills for once free websites (some resulting in closure), the increased difficulty to access public information such as Reddit and Twitter, and lastly ignore the amount of conversations being taken away from the public in favor of LLMs, I would agree.
    skarz · 1789738004 · focus · HN ↗
    Except books are already destroyed in physical form every single day. My local library has a section near the front for free and/or extremely cheap books ($1) they are desperately trying to get rid of. My impression is that if they are untaken/unsold they will end up in a dumpster.
    [Edit] Here's an article from 2003 talking about how Random House destroyed up to 25,000 books a day: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/19/fiction.stephenmoss" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/19/fiction.stephe...
    lenkite · 1789741722 · focus · HN ↗
    The scale is completely different. It is like comparing an Ant to a Star Devouring Shoggoth. OpenAI destroyed millions of books in hardly any time. Its like comparing a conflict where people broke their nails to the world wars.
    <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
    rpdillon · 1789742349 · focus · HN ↗
    > They are destroying the foundations of civilization
    No, they are not. For all the hype around that 404 media article, no one came forward with titles or authors. Turns out the booksellers that sold them those books said they were "dead inventory".
    If you're going to assert that companies are destroying the foundations of civilization, you're going to have to produce quite a bit more evidence than the (poorly cited) 404 Media article.
    lenkite · 1789743578 · focus · HN ↗
    Evidence ? Good lord, how about the US district court of justice ? Anthropic physically destroyed millions of books after scanning them - are you really, truly questioning that ?
    Here is what was signed by Judge Alsup at <a href="https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/candce/3%3A2024cv05417/434709/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califo...
    > Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase MILLIONS of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals.
    Dismissing the above as "dead inventory" is atrocious reasoning. The more obscure/low-circulation books are arguably MORE valuable as training material because they contain information that is less likely to be duplicated across the ordinary web.
    And 404 Media's reporting wasn't merely based on a bookseller's terminology of your "dead inventory". There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world"
    <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-quest-to-destructively-scan-all-the-worlds-books/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-que...
    rpdillon · 1789747619 · focus · HN ↗
    They are destroying books that they bought. It should not be controversial that part of ownership is decided how to dispose of the owned object.
    But nothing you're citing adds up to "destroying the foundations of civilization". What we have instead is companies that are now paying to get copies of creative works (isn't this what everyone is complaining about with all the "theft" rhetoric?) so they can use them for training.
    When they discuss scanning all the books in the world, they are not talking about every copy, since that makes no sense. They want one of each.
    So, in the end, this all sounds like some breathless emotional take because large companies are buying copies of books and using them to train AI and throwing them away. They are probably destroying fewer books than the publishing houses do over the same time period.
    This is like the water discussion: people with no understanding of agriculture (or publishing) hear a sound-bite about what AI is doing, and, with little-to-no context, devolve into a panic about it.
    Again: cite real harm. What books aren't available? What knowledge was destroyed? There are real concerns about AI, but this whole discussion is a distraction.
    autoexec · 1789750628 · focus · HN ↗
    > They are destroying books that they bought. It should not be controversial that part of ownership is decided how to dispose of the owned object.
    By your reasoning, if I could afford to buy every surviving painting by Van Gogh and Rembrandt and I burned them in a bon fire I wouldn't be taking anything from human culture and nobody should care at all about what I do with my belongings. Destroying something that is rare or one of a kind and valuable does matter. Doing it so that you can exclusively profit by charging people for regurgitating what was lost back out along with random errors makes it even worse.
    jacquesm · 1789751731 · focus · HN ↗
    More so because their digital copy increases in value because of the destruction.
    rpdillon · 1789753243 · focus · HN ↗
    Only in a world where we can't make new copies, which does not seem to be this world.
    rpdillon · 1789753225 · focus · HN ↗
    In your scenario, the bug is letting someone control all of that in a private collection. But that scenario is completely divorced from what is actually happening, so I don't think it's worth discussing too deeply here.
    If you actually object to the concept that people that own a physical object get to decide how to dispose of it, that would be an interesting discussion to have because it would fly in the face of property ownership rights.
    calf · 1789754237 · focus · HN ↗
    Why such a blinkered argument, I own the soda can I just drank but it is still, arguably, wrong of me to chuck it in the trash instead of the recycle bin. Yes, you have the "right" to dispose of things you own but there's more to what's right than that. There's human decency, consideration, awareness of the environment, the spirit of the laws, cases the laws were not designed for in mind etc.
    Like, tell your mother or HS teacher you decided not to recycle because you own your trash. See how well that clever argument goes.
    8note · 1789762459 · focus · HN ↗
    if the recyclers really think the aluminum in that can is valuable, theyll fush it out if the garbage or the dump to get it.
    putting that sorting and disposal on end customers was a business way of offloading their making single use trash problems on somebody else.
    point any blame for cans in the trash where it belongs - can makers
    8note · 1789762210 · focus · HN ↗
    you should indeed be able to, but maybe buying art shouldn't be allowed at all, with people only being allowed digital recreations.
    why do you need more than a picture of the rembrandt? there's so much good artwork easily available that the rembrandt is only worth money because hoity toity people want to store their money in it and in the future sell it again
    lenkite · 1789760765 · focus · HN ↗
    Many were out of print or were used copies, so they weren't books you could simply order new from a publisher. They are out of print. Anthropic deliberately sourced large quantities through used-book sellers such as Better World Books and World of Books and destroyed the physical copies after scanning them.
    If you find this a "breathless emotional take", then I don't even know what to say. Nothing will meet your criteria in your fawning of corporate destruction.
    tbrownaw · 1789747846 · focus · HN ↗
    > There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world"
    If I do something destructive to my copy of Accelerate -- feed it through a scanner, leave it where the munchkin can reach, whatever -- that does nothing to deprive you of your copy. Books are funny like that; there tend to be lots of identical ones.
    TeMPOraL · 1789738287 · focus · HN ↗
    > the massive amount of books being destroyed
    Surely that's not about AI? Or you mean the small fraction of that that's result of "destructive format shift" process[0], which itself is a consequence of copyright regulation that would otherwise prevent anyone from accessing these works?
    > the outages and increased usage bills for once free websites (some resulting in closure)
    That's assumed to be AI companies for some reason, even if they have no real incentive to do that, while the usual business underbelly of people scraping web for whatever reasons (which now may include some AI upstart wannabies too, to be fair) is forgotten about. Not helping is people confusing AI agents acting as user-agents and doing one-off fetches with "AI scrappers".
    > the increased difficulty to access public information such as Reddit and Twitter
    It was never public, and they started locking down before AI, when both platforms (as well as all other social media platforms) run out of VC subsidsies and realized they need to start monetizing; first step they did was to wage a war on third-party clients and API users. AI came later.
    > ignore the amount of conversations being taken away from the public in favor of LLMs
    You mean human agency? Like, humans deciding it's better for them to ask a machine instead of posting questions online? I can understand that, it's usually much better experience (particularly on sites like StackOverflow - they dug their own grave here, and they know it; there have been memes about this way before LLMs were a thing).
    You're also not considering the amount of questions answered that would not have been asked otherwise. I for one don't ask many questions on-line, so anything I ask LLMs that they solve for me, is a question that would've remained unanswered for me otherwise. Not everyone is gregarious online, many people are more self-reliant and only answer questions, but solve their own problems without asking for help (it's probably not optimal thing to do, but that's another topic).
    --
    [0] - Digitizing and retaining physical copy is clear infringement, digitizing but destroying the physical original can be argued to be fair use.
    watwut · 1789742925 · focus · HN ↗
    > You mean human agency? Like, humans deciding it's better for them to ask a machine instead of posting questions online?
    Oh, please, AI is single most hated technology to the level we did not seen before. And that is after staggering propaganda going out of these CEO that hiding behind human agency is beyond lie. It was pushed on us, whether we like it or not, because people with a lot of money are the only ones who matter.
    And people with a lot of money have that weird cult belief in emerging AI god and singularity, so they dont care what they destroy in the process.
    ch4s3 · 1789738359 · focus · HN ↗
    Your talking about a bunch of books that are out of print and sat unsold for years in a warehouse somewhere. The rights holders could print another run tomorrow if they wanted, or better yet digitize them but they don’t. Where’s your ire for the rights holders who sit on these books and don’t do anything with the ?
    lkjdsklf · 1789738964 · focus · HN ↗
    > Where’s your ire for the rights holders who sit on these books and don’t do anything with the ?
    Why would I have ire towards someone for doing what they want with their IP?
    I make things that I don't release or show to anyone all the time. Why would I expect others to be any different?
    shimman · 1789740564 · focus · HN ↗
    "Yes we are destroying books but it's your fault!"
    Can't believe this is the brain trust of the tech world. It really speaks on how poor SF + VC are at US politics.
    [deleted] · 1789741512 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    BeetleB · 1789743347 · focus · HN ↗
    They legally bought the books they are destroying.
    I have every right to burn all the books I possess. And so should they.
    shimman · 1789743876 · focus · HN ↗
    "Shut up, we have the right to destroy cultural artifacts because we have money."
    lol this is even stupider than the previous comment. Yeah golly gee, I wonder why the majority of the American electorate distrust tech companies, tech leaders, and tech workers?
    Y'all need to do some mutual aid and get your humanity back.
    BeetleB · 1789750629 · focus · HN ↗
    They have no more right to destroy cultural artifacts than you do. It's a red herring, as no one has demonstrated a single loss of a cultural artifact. What was destroyed, that satisfies:
    1. You cannot obtain elsewhere
    2. That anyone cares about
    Destroying a copy of a Harry Potter is not a loss of a cultural artifact if I can still buy the book at a store.
    Go ahead and start a campaign: For all who are upset by this, list your physical address, and tell everyone to mail their unwanted books to those on the list instead of destroying them.
    The catch is the recipients are not allowed to destroy them. Then we'll see how much those complaining value culture.
    GuinansEyebrows · 1789743889 · focus · HN ↗
    the argument of some hypothetical "right to burn all the books i possess" is not really the topic of discussion here. it's not a "can" argument, it's a "should" argument.
    BeetleB · 1789750342 · focus · HN ↗
    > it's not a "can" argument, it's a "should" argument.
    When you take a pitchfork against all the libraries out there who either refuse donations, or destroy the donated books, then we'll talk.
    As plenty of people have pointed out, no one has shown that anything of value has really been lost. Either the works are still available for you to obtain (i.e. they didn't destroy the last version), or they are things no one wanted.
    prophesi · 1789751077 · focus · HN ↗
    Someone needs to write an updated version of Fahrenheit 451, maybe titled Fahrenheit-451GB-A32.
    BeetleB · 1789751169 · focus · HN ↗
    The version where it's legal to own books...?
    prophesi · 1789752297 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm thinking more of a future where big tech successfully moves the overton window for AI, people gradually rely on getting information from LLM's more than books, then it can follow the regular plotline of 451 with the public voting to ban books.
    ch4s3 · 1789763032 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s their fault they don’t print more of them pr digitize them, yes. The fact is though, most of these books weren’t selling and no one wanted them.
    MattDaEskimo · 1789746002 · focus · HN ↗
    It's the collective action of losing access to information that's the issue, not the potential of the book itself.
    Regardless, these books were available. Researchers, hobbyists - many people have and will find value.
    Justifying the destruction of information for a for-profit company is bizarre.
    rpdillon · 1789746943 · focus · HN ↗
    Destruction of books is normal and totally OK. Publishing houses do it daily in the thousands. When you own something, you can choose how to dispose of it. Come back when you title of actual valuable rare books that were bought and destroyed. The 404 article was not well researched in this regard.
    The emotional reaction we're conditioned to have harkens back to 1940s Germany, where the goal was to have people burn all the copies of existing works. But this is not that. They are going for "one of each book" so they have a comprehensive corpus of works to train from. They are willing to buy books to obtain this corpus. It sounds like the system working exactly as intended, with even the book sellers selling these books saying they are "dead inventory".
    There's a time to be breathless about "destroying all of humanity's knowledge", but let's wait until it's actually happening.
    Again, I'm am very anxious for anyone to come forward with credible information about any valuable/rare/irreplaceable book that was destroyed in this process. So far zero people have been able to do this, probably because they are buying the books in bulk and want to obtain them as cheaply as possible. Book sellers will know the value of an actually rare/valuable books, and would charge accordingly, which would be pointless for e.g. Amazon to pay. They don't need some crazy first edition, they just need some copy to digitize. The incentives just don't add up to "Amazon is buying priceless art and burning it!" the way the narrative suggests.
    ch4s3 · 1789771441 · focus · HN ↗
    The publishers and rights holders still have the text, and the books themselves weren’t being accessed just sitting in a warehouse. This is a trivial problem to solve, digitize them.
    internet101010 · 1789739031 · focus · HN ↗
    Eh, StackOverflow deserved to go.
    BeetleB · 1789743636 · focus · HN ↗
    Most of these things are bad. None of them is robbery, though. Some are of questionable legality, but most are not.
    People need to face reality. The old Internet was fragile and couldn't have lasted long. It was dying slowly due to closed social media and LLMs are accelerating that death.
    I'd rather it die quickly and be replaced by something more robust than decay slowly. I was sick of how it was before LLMs even came among.

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