Recently, Anthropic came under scrutiny again when a WaPo article announced that the company, best known for their Claude AI model, destroyed more than 1.5 million books in the processes of digitizing books.
I’ve benefit tremendously from digital archives. I wrote many research papers in undergraduate and graduate school from sources online that afforded my generous source material from around the world, from local newspapers across Latin America, from historical archives in Europe, all from the comfort of my home, office, or drabby corner of a library
When is it appropriate to destroy in order to preserve? Do the benefits outweigh the consequences? If a book’s spine must be severed in order to give new life, in a digital rebirth, is this death worth the sacrifice? What if it’s the last copy of the book? If it’s a rare printing or perhaps even the last printed copy? How do we weigh these consequences? Are AI companies making these choices for us? Do historians get a say?
