Spineless

“Within about a year, according to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed more knowledge into the AI models behind products such as its popular chatbot Claude.” How did AI get so smart about so many topics so quickly? It read. Everything. WaPo (Gift Article): Inside a tech company’s secretive plan to destroy millions of books. “Court filings reveal how AI companies raced to obtain more books to feed chatbots, including by buying, scanning and disposing of millions of titles.” (While I’m flattered AI deemed my book worthy of inhaling, I really wish they had bought a copy. I could have used the sales numbers.)