AI Is Destroying Millions of Books (But Not For The Reason You Think)

Is AI destroying human literature?

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You might have seen the viral videos of a "book guillotine" slicing the spines off thousands of books in a massive warehouse. Last week, the internet exploded after videos surfaced showing Anthropic cutting the spines off thousands of books to train AI models. Social media quickly filled with claims that AI companies were destroying rare books, erasing human knowledge, and building a future where artificial intelligence replaces libraries.

But is that actually what happened?

In this episode of Power User, I sit down with tech policy expert Derek Slater, who worked on the original Google Books project, to explain why Anthropic is actually scanning books and destroying physical copies afterward, how decades of copyright law (not just AI) created this bizarre situation, and how we can actually save the books!!

We discuss:

• Why Anthropic buys books by the pallet

• Whether rare books are actually being destroyed

• How Google Books handled digitization

• Why copyright law incentivizes destroying books

• The Internet Archive lawsuits

• Fair use and AI training

• The future of libraries in the AI era

• Why the viral outrage missed the bigger story