Is AI destroying human literature? SUPPORT MY WORK: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at https://www.usermag.co Support my work on Patreon: http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz 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 copyright attorney 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 palletWhether rare books are actually being destroyedHow Google Books handled digitizationWhy copyright law incentivizes destroying booksThe Internet Archive lawsuitsFair use and AI trainingThe future of libraries in the AI eraWhy the viral outrage missed the bigger story

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