AI company Anthropic “destructively scanned” millions of books to help train their chatbot, Claude.
What does “destructively scan” mean? Well, basically, they used a big hydraulic cutting machine to slice the spines off so they could scan the pages more easily, and then the whole mess got thrown in the recycling.
Millions of books, ripped apart, scanned, and dumped.
And this was after they’d already illegally pirated millions of books from online sources, for which they ended up getting sued by authors.
As a book lover, this gives me absolute chills. But at least they bought these books first (unlike the ones they pirated digitally).
But... why do it at all? Doesn’t the internet have enough text to train on?
No.
It turns out, for the AI models to keep improving, they need novel tokens.
If we can anthropomorphize the models or, more accurately, the companies behind them for a second, they are hungry for novelty.
They’ll spend billions of dollars in lawsuit settlements for it. They’ll destroy millions of books for it.
But you know what they’re not hungry for? The same old thing they’ve seen before.
Which is one of the biggest reasons I keep writing this newsletter by hand, and why I encourage (force?) my clients to hop on novel token sessions with me every week.
Time was, to get your website or content listed on Google you needed links from other websites. And, to a large extent, you still do.
But to get listed in AI overviews, in ChatGPT or Perplexity, or any other LLM-based search engine, you need something else:
What I’m calling novel abundance.
It’s not enough to have one good idea in one place. Now, we need lots of good ideas (or variations on a theme) in lots of places.
We need our content to stand out from the slop, not blend in by having ChatGPT write our content for us, whole cloth.
Because if our content looks, sounds, and seems the same as anyone else’s, why would ours get chosen by the search algorithm or LLM evaluation?
These companies are hungry, destructively so, for novelty.
If we want to be found, we need something novel to feed them.
Kelford Inc. shows you the way to always knowing what to say.