Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard - both for starting this, and for covering the previous week. We should get a bot to automate this...)
There is something about this picture, a warehouse full of books to be destroyed by Anthropic for training data, that just makes me sick. Knowing that they are destroying books in the abstract is bad enough, but seeing the sheer scale of it makes me viscerally angry.
Karen Hao called her book Empire of AI for a very good reason. The empire has all these noble narratives of bringing civilization and progress to the colonies, but in reality the empire only sees resources to be extracted, repackaged, and sold back to their subjects at a fee. Kudos to those who saw this immediately and fought against it. Shame on those who believed in the narrative of progress, to the point where many of them are collaborators with the empire.
Whenever a smarmy fellow on Linkedin posts about how AI is making so much progress in coding or math, I want them to see this picture. I want them to see the videos of families in tears after a data center takes away their home with eminent domain, and other families who have to deal with the resulting pollution. Go beyond the bloodless math of tokens and instead see for yourself what this all truly costs. I hope it was worth it.
Fuck Anthropic. Snotty little bastards want to talk about AI safety and then destroy books to make a pollution machine.
What kills me is that there are so many obvious ways to be less wasteful about this. Nondestructive book scanners exist. They're expensive but it's not like AI companies are averse to throwing money down a fucking hole. Even if that's not an option, it's possible to rebind the pages and return the books to the market. And regardless of what happens to the physical books, the scans they create could be archived in a format that could be available as a digital library rather than just being fed into the statistical meat grinder to keep the trough topped off with slop. Even if they've got to fight with copyright holders it would cost them basically nothing to leave the option open and given the PR battle they've been losing it feels like doing so would be incredibly obvious. Hell, even Google Books was able to navigate this in a way that was less cartoonishly evil than this because they could point to their digitization effort as a public good in ways that Anthropic here just fucking can't.
The reason that they are destroying the books is to avoid the accusation that the scanning constituted copying, an irony that we've discussed previously, on Awful while trying to understand which court cases are relevant. Anthropic actually hired the same guy, Tom Turvey, who designed Google Books' ingestion process, so I'm thinking of this as a sequel to Google Books; hopefully the courts won't take a decade this time.