AI will end government as we know it and it will start with the books | Redacted

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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

Dr. Sally LePage 0:00

To Tallinn or to Stockholm?

Unknown 0:26

Let's party!

James Crawford 0:28

Let's go to the ship!

Natalie (Natali Morris) 0:45

AI companies are scanning and destroying millions of physical books. They're buying them in bulk, cutting off their spines and feeding the pages through industrial scanners and discarding the originals, all to create private training data for artificial intelligence. Now, this went viral a couple of weeks ago. It is true. We've looked into it and it's true and we're going to show it to you. Now, why should we care? Well, because this is straight out of 1984. If you control the surviving record, you control what future generations can know about the past. As someone who regularly reads books that you cannot get on Amazon, this is extremely upsetting. If you're already skeptical about what you can read online, just wait until it is fully curated by the elites with a political agenda.

Natalie (Natali Morris) 1:33

So is AI consuming and privatizing our cultural memory? And could the race to build smarter machines permanently destroy parts of human knowledge? Now, here is the court case where we learned about this. It's Barts versus Anthropic. It's a copyright case filed by a group of authors in the summer of 2024. The court records reveal that Anthropic had acquired millions of books in in two very different ways. It downloaded over 7 million copies of books from pirated libraries that it knew were illegal libraries, and it also spent millions of dollars purchasing physical books and cutting off their bindings, scanning every page, and discarding the originals. Now, the case ultimately resulted in a $1.5 billion class action settlement, but that was only about the pirated books.

Natalie (Natali Morris) 2:24

The legal roadmap that it leaves is consequential because the part about destroying the books that you purchase, even if it's the only copy, the court says that's fair use. They can do it. So the ruling is not binding on every court in America, but what is the dangerous precedent that other AI companies can do the same, destroy original copies of books and then only keep a digital copy? So Anthropic paid an enormous settlement over the books that it piratized. So now we're going to talk about what this means for our future. Now, recently, I went to the British Museum in London with my family. And inside the center is a big library called the Round Reading Room in the Great Pyramid. This is one of the most iconic libraries in the Western world.

Natalie (Natali Morris) 3:09

In its heyday, it was made up of three miles of bookcases containing around 25 miles of shelving. It could accommodate 302 readers at 38 tables. Now today, you just walk in and you look at an empty room. There's no tables, no person sitting there, and there are dusty books on the shelves still, but you can't touch them. Now, there's a sign there that says something to the effect of we're trying to figure out what to do with this in today's digital age. And in fact, that's what the website says as well, that the museum has been consulting wildly, widely and probably wildly on what to do with this space. Now, this feels increasingly ominous because there is a remarkable connection to what we're discussing today.

Natalie (Natali Morris) 3:52

George Orwell himself used this reading room. So the room where Orwell researched and wrote now sits at the center of the question that we're warned about, who will preserve the historical record and who will control it? Now, we're going to talk to a Google whistleblower about this in a minute. But first, I want to tell you about one of our show sponsors. this episode is brought to you by rumble wallet quick question how much control do you have over your money right now well technology keeps reshaping our lives and crypto is changing how financial transactions are made rumble wallet makes it easy to set up a wallet and buy cryptocurrency you can choose bitcoin a stable coin tied to the us dollar or tether gold which is in fact backed by real gold

Natalie (Natali Morris) 4:36

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