Kayla Lopez

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593 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 19 Aug

Kayla Lopez’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 4.

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Morning Brew Daily · Meta’s $1.4T Trial Over Child Safety Begins & Is AI Buying and Destroying Used Books? · 18 Aug 2026 podcast

And it's recently come to light that some of these anonymous nerds are actually AI companies, which are reportedly using the physical books to train their models.

So why is this happening?

In 2024, a group of authors sued generative AI company Anthropocal.

For copyright infringement, claiming that their works were used illegally to train its AI models.

While the AI giant did have to pay $1.5 billion in settlement to more than 300,000 authors who filed a claim, the judge in the case determined that if the company paid for the books, then it is not illegal to train AI models using the texts.

This has created a market for cheaper books, sending companies to buy as many used books as they can get their hands on.

Once these AI companies get access to the physical books, they may engage in a process called destructive scanning.

These books' spines get removed so individual pages can scan more quickly and fed into LLM's training data.

After the pages have been scanned, they are tossed.

Neil, it seems like the tech that brought us Fruit Love Island is now looking for obscure texts to ingest.

Yeah, and it's true.

Uh Anthropic confirmed in legal filings that they've been buying up books in what they're calling Project Panama, in an effort to, quote, destructively scan all the books in the world, which is quite ambitious, if you ask me.

Um, but a lot of the outrage online from this came from individuals protesting the destruction of rare or obscure books.

Um, the question here that the Atlantic investigated is are they actually destroying rare books?

books or is it just old books that nobody really wants?

And you mentioned the insider's guide to Metro Denver from 1995.

I don't really think that's super relevant to me today.

Uh and so, you know, if it's getting recycled, uh maybe there's there's not a huge sadness around that.

And the books that these companies are buying may be rare in the sense that there are only a few copies, but not necessarily that it's a first edition, you know, uh great expectations or anything like that.

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