AI's rare book destruction, protest to ban AI
Antique books being destroyed by AI company Anthropic is drawing a lot of justified anger. Their plan to 'destructively scan' every book in the world is difficult to believe, that they could stoop so low. Other methods for scanning books exist, where you don't destroy the book in the process. And the reasons for the book destruction are just as appalling: they know how terrible AI slop is so they can't train on it, and they didn't want other AI companies to have the priceless books. So they were quite happy to destroy beautiful rare books, even though the end result is that society loses priceless books and gains more terrible AI slop!
A petition to make this book destruction a crime was begun here at change.org, which I have signed and encourage others to do so:
'Make destroying vintage books for AI a felony'
https://www.change.org/p/make-destroying-vintage-books-for-ai-a-felony
That protest wasn't started by me, but the book destruction got to me so I started a new protest. I already knew AI companies were evil in stealing the entire world's copyrighted works and turning them into slop. But destroying antique books is just a whole new totalitarian level. There have been comparisons to Farenheit 451 and 1984 - both of which I remember reading in high school. These are just a few of the complaints:
What Anthropic Is Doing To Millions Of Rare Books MUST Be Stopped
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SvKhj-jHbA&t=647s
The Book Burning has Begun... [explicit language warning!]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSNd8rnHvUU
This AI Company is Literally Slaughtering Books
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_0Z4gife54
After watching many of these sort of videos and reading the angry comments, I wondered how many people would support an outright ban of LLMs, AI programs and Gen AI content - which is built on illegal copyright infringement, and created the following protest:
Ban LLMs, AI programs and Gen AI content based on pirated Copyrighted materials.
It's only suggesting a ban on something that's already illegal. (mass copyright infringement) If the AI programs weren't produced legally, they should be banned. It seems odd that I need to argue for this - why didn't they already do something like this a long time ago?
Maybe starting the protest was a knee-jerk reaction, but book destroying?!... what's wrong with these AI idiots?
Clarification: I know I'd said I'd never started a protest before in the last update (August 1), which was true, for then. And it's still true, historically speaking. My original first ever protest 'Demand tech companies release all copyright holders data used in training of Generative AI' was started in June/July 2026 (1st draft uploaded here June 19, which I started promoting July 1).
Now this new protest 'Ban LLMs, AI programs and Gen AI content based on pirated Copyrighted materials' was started on August 10, after I read a lot of complaints about AI's book destruction.
Just wanted to make that clear in case someone saw my 'I'd never started a protest before' comment on August 1, and then saw my new August 10 protest, without noticing the dates, and thought I wasn't being truthful. If you don't believe me, check the dates which change.org adds to the protest and update!
The other 1000+ protests mentioning 'artificial intelligence' at change.org I didn't have anything to do with, though I've signed quite a few of them now.
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*The other day I heard about an interesting way that people fight back against the AI thieves by 'poisoning' data they steal with programs called 'Glaze' and 'Nightshade,' described in this animation from The Infographics Show:
The AI Economy Is DEAD. 6 Billion Images Now POISONED.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zF-mbwc5Mmw
*Protests continue against data centre construction. For what seems a useful short guide to stopping data centres being built in America, see this 4 minute video by athlete and environmental advocate Caroline Gleich:
'How to stop a data center'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7thvNzZEL8
*On a lighter note is this parody of data centre promotion on the 'Man Carrying Thing' channel:
How AI companies thought we’d react to this