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.
    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.

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