Solarbird Feb 1

I literally read this short story in ... probably Asimov's SF, probably in the 1990s. Could've been Analog.

Seriously, though - this was, like, the entire plot. Exactly this. EXACTLY this.

From https://futurism.com/future-society/anthropic-destroying-books :

Anthropic shredded millions of physical books to train its Claude AI model — and new documents suggest that it was well aware of just how bad it would look if anyone found out.

#AI #books #theft #LLM #LLMs #Anthropic #Claude

Anthropic Knew the Public Would Be Disgusted by How It Was Destroying Physical Books, Secret Documents Reveal

Newly unsealed documents suggest that Anthropic was well aware that destroying books to train its AI would look bad.

Futurism
Show threadIngvarFeb 1

@moira It's certainly an element in Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End".

Shovelling books through shredders, scanning the fragments coming out and then recombining using sequence assemble techniques from DNA studies.

Show threadSolarbird Feb 1
@vatine I've also read that, and liked it, but much later. But I don't think I'm conflating stories. For one thing, I remember there was an ending.
Show threadIngvar
@moira It is ENTIRELY possible that there was a similar thing in a short story, earlier (possibly even by Vinge).
Feb 1 at 7:32amWeb
Show threadSolarbird Feb 1

@vatine Yeah, I went and checked, he had his first short story _collection_ in like 1989, so he'd been writing for a while. Totally could've been one of his.

I mean, I like his work and I remembered this story and those facts do tend to be pretty strongly associated with each other.

Also having read it in the 90s doesn't mean it was published in the 90s, I have a long-established habit of reading a lot of old stuff. E.g. currently finishing up a 1931 Peter Wimsey detective novel. I don't really care about the mystery in this one, but I have been enjoying between-wars Scotland.

(Minus the surprise "wow, that came out of fucking _nowhere_" N-word drop mid book. Not expecting that one holy shit. Which is of course the problem.)