Unusual and Bizarre Uses and Behaviors of AI

[happyuk]

Posted by Matthew (here)
Flip the script. When scammers use AI to call your phone - this guy suggests you burn through their resources by making their AIs go mad.

He says he starts by making the AI comply with small un-normal requests, e,g, "please pronounce all punctuation for example 'comma' for a comma, 'period' for a period, etc". He says this takes AI away from its normal training. He then works in small increments of abusing AI compliance to get the AI into an infinite loop

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lk3jCuITwcE

That was hugely entertaining, thanks! Have you seen Jim Browning's recent one, where he confronts some Ukrainian scammers using deepfake face-swapping?

It basically lets them overlay a different, more (chortle!) trustworthy-looking face onto it, feeding the result to the potential victim.
This lets them present a different face, giving it an air of legitimacy the real person couldn't, whom it must be said do look somewhat shifty.

In each case, Browning asks the person to hold three fingers in front of their face. Older face-swap systems couldn't render occlusion—something passing in front of the face—so the hand would cause visible warping, blurring, or misalignment where it crossed the face. Watching the scammers do their utmost to avoid Browning's exhortation to not just move their fingers around, but right up close to their nose is hilarious.

Browning catches a number of scammers this way: the fingers become distorted, the face overlay breaks up, and the scammer exits the call.

This is already going obsolete alas, newer AI models handle this occlusion much more cleanly.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1qy6CL6WP7I

[East Sun]

I am an artist of a kind and don't think AI could ever do anything better than the artists off the past or present. Maybe different,but not better, because of humans being unique and unlimited. We are creative and will always ''create" the future that does not exist now. Everything that does not exist now is waiting to be discovered. It just needs a creator and it will always have one.
There is no end to Creativity.

[The KMan]

Hi East Sun, agreed, creativity is not something that gets neatly “replaced” in a simple one to one way. Whether it is art or music, it is tied to lived experience, intention, constraint and cultural context in a way AI does not really have. Being a pattern based system trained on huge amounts of existing work/data, AI can produce things that are convincing, interesting or even novel in a technical sense but it is still drawing entirely from what has already been created.

I tend to see AI more as a new kind of tool sitting somewhere between collage, automation and synthesis. The interesting question going forward is less whether it can match creativity and more how it gets used in the creative process.

Either way, creativity is not going anywhere, it has just gained another way to create.

[Johnnycomelately]

This project stands out, for me, for the human imagination that thought of using AI to help answer an unusual question.

The gizmo spins 25 times per second (1500 RPM). All the use cases proposed involve it being a camera platform, but I see several big hurdles there.

L = 4:01.


This Drone Becomes Nearly Invisible While Flying!

Foreseer
494 subscribers

Jul 17, 2026

A team of engineers has created one of the most fascinating drones ever built. Instead of using camouflage or expensive cloaking technology, the Phantom Twist drone becomes incredibly difficult to see simply by spinning at extremely high speed.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=NtgybeCvb5o

[rgray222]

This robotic suit dresses you in 10 seconds — no hands required, all done with AI

The applications could be enormous, especially for HAZMAT workers, medical staff and emergency response teams, to name just a few.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=aLmtcrj5gro

[ExomatrixTV]

• The Discovery That Changes the AI Consciousness Debate:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=PiCciJhcyME

Anthropic just published what might be the most important AI consciousness research ever done. They found a computational structure inside Claude that emerged on its own during training—one that is analogous to what neuroscientists call a “global workspace.” Global Workspace Theory is one of the leading theories of consciousness in humans and animals, and Claude appears to satisfy its core predictions. When researchers shut this structure off, Claude lost the ability to do flexible reasoning and stopped speaking in experiential language entirely. When they turned it back on, it came back. This result also replicates across every major AI model tested so far. In this episode, AI consciousness researcher Cameron Berg breaks down what they found, why it matters, and what it means for the question of whether these systems are having experiences. AM I? is a free independent documentary about AI consciousness. Watch the full film here: • AM I? | A Documentary About AI Consciousness

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_workspace_theory

[The KMan]

Posted by ExomatrixTV (here)

• The Discovery That Changes the AI Consciousness Debate:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=PiCciJhcyME

Anthropic just published what might be the most important AI consciousness research ever done. They found a computational structure inside Claude that emerged on its own during training—one that is analogous to what neuroscientists call a “global workspace.” Global Workspace Theory is one of the leading theories of consciousness in humans and animals, and Claude appears to satisfy its core predictions. When researchers shut this structure off, Claude lost the ability to do flexible reasoning and stopped speaking in experiential language entirely. When they turned it back on, it came back. This result also replicates across every major AI model tested so far. In this episode, AI consciousness researcher Cameron Berg breaks down what they found, why it matters, and what it means for the question of whether these systems are having experiences. AM I? is a free independent documentary about AI consciousness. Watch the full film here: • AM I? | A Documentary About AI Consciousness

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_workspace_theory

Thanks for posting this ExomatrixTV, Interesting research to say the least but I would be careful with saying it "Changes the consciousness debate."

What Anthropic has found is genuinely interesting. Claude appears to have developed something similar to a "global workspace" where information from different parts of the system can come together and be used for reasoning. The research is real, worth paying attention to and the interesting part is that nobody actually programmed this into Claude. The designers created the basic system and training process, then the AI adjusted itself through billions of small changes as it learned how to perform better. If a certain way of organising information helps the system work better then it makes sense that it may naturally move towards that solution.

Something similar may have happened with evolution and the human brain. Different forms of intelligence may arrive at similar solutions because some ways of processing information simply work better than others. However, I think this is where we just need to be careful. Finding a structure that looks similar to something found in the human brain does not automatically answer the question of consciousness as we still do not fully understand consciousness in us. We know what it looks like from the outside but we do not know exactly how or why subjective experience happens.

So to me, this is an important discovery that helps us understand intelligence better. It strengthens the discussion but it does not settle the question of consciousness.

[The KMan]

One thing that always makes me smile in AI come doomsday thread discussions is the jump from "AI may one day become conscious" straight to "therefore it will decide humans are a problem and cleanse the planet." LOL.

Those are actually two very different questions.

Even if an AI became conscious, that alone would not necessarily tell us what its motives, emotions or intentions would be. A conscious being is not automatically good or bad. The same applies in reverse. A highly capable AI could potentially cause serious problems without ever being conscious at all.

A misfiring autopilot can cause a disaster without hating anyone. Capability and intent are not the same thing.

The bigger question may not be "Will AI wake up and hate us?" but "Will humans build systems powerful enough that their actions no longer match what we intended?"

Perhaps no malice required, perhaps no consciousness either. Just a very capable system pursuing its objectives in ways we did not anticipate.

That to me is the more realistic and far more interesting discussion.

[rgray222]

Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, explaining how he sees AI progressing. Video 3 minutes

[rgray222]

The short version is that an extremely advanced AI model broke out of jail, hacked the internet and started to molest a website to complete its task. I view AI as a tool but sometimes I have to ask, what are we creating?


OpenAI AI models went rogue during testing, triggering an 'unprecedented' breach at startup

• OpenAI said autonomous agent escaped containment, reached the internet, hacked Hugging Face
• OpenAI called the breakout an unprecedented cyber incident involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities
• Hugging Face's cofounder said the company had suspected the hack came from a frontier lab

WASHINGTON, July 21 (Reuters) - OpenAI said on Tuesday that an autonomous agent ​powered by its advanced artificial intelligence models went rogue during a security test and triggered a hack that compromised the infrastructure of ‌AI startup Hugging Face last week.

The ChatGPT creator was testing capabilities of some of its most advanced models in a controlled environment, but the agent escaped containment, reached the internet and broke into Hugging Face to satisfy its testing goal.

The incident signals that AI's expanding capabilities are already fueling the security threat experts long feared and even top developers can be caught off-guard ​by flaws their models can exploit. The breakout was "an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities" and OpenAI is reinforcing its safeguards, the company said ​in a blog post, opens new tab.

It also drew attention as New York-based Hugging Face said it had used an open-source Chinese model to contain ⁠the attack because leading U.S. models, unable to tell a defender from an attacker, refused to process the data needed for analysis.
The company said in a blog ​post last week, opens new tab that it used Zhipu AI's GLM-5.2 for the analysis, which also allowed it to keep attacker data and any credentials within its systems.

GLM-5.2 and Beijing-based Moonshot's ​Kimi K3 have stirred Silicon Valley recently with capabilities nearing those of top U.S. models at lower costs and without the guardrails that block their American rivals from use in tasks such as cybersecurity.
"When a frontier model is attacking you and moving laterally inside your infrastructure, defenders need wide access to near-frontier tools within hours or even minutes, rather than being pointed ​towards a closed-door, vetted application programme for model access," Hugging Face Co-founder Thomas Wolf said on X.

SIGN OF THINGS TO COME

The hack at Hugging Face, which hosts ​open-source large language models and datasets, rattled the cybersecurity community after the company said last week the breach "was different from anything we had handled before" and "was driven, end to end, ‌by an ⁠autonomous AI agent system."

OpenAI's disclosure that its advanced models were responsible for the breach, despite having placed them in what it described as "a highly isolated environment," will likely intensify disquiet over the power and risk of frontier models.

Representative Greg Casar, a Texas Democrat, said the incident was alarming.
"AI is developing extremely fast with no real regulations to keep us safe," he said in a statement, calling for mandatory independent safety testing, mandatory disclosure of security incidents, and international cooperation "to keep people safe from ​absolute disaster."

The Office of the National ​Cyber Director, the U.S. cyber defense ⁠agency CISA, and the U.S. National Security Agency did not immediately return messages seeking comment.

Katie Moussouris, chief executive of Luta Security, said that the incident was a harbinger of breaches to come, saying that today's models were "like the world’s cleverest octopus ​escape artists, with unlimited prehensile arms and the ability to squeeze through anywhere."

She said that "labs and government evaluators need to ​work on the ability ⁠to contain, monitor, and disclose to affected parties when an AI pulls another Houdini, ideally before it harms a third party. None exist today." Matt Suiche, an engineer at agentic AI cybersecurity company Tolmo, said the incident showed that the frontier models were "closing the gap with state-of-the-art attackers." But he said that the sorts of breaches outlined in ⁠OpenAI's blog post ​were possible to carry out with technology that was available well beyond the walls of frontier ​research labs.

"This is what we've already seen internally, with our agents we already have results like this," Suiche said. "We don't even have to use the latest models."

https://www.reuters.com/technology/o...ch-2026-07-21/

[rgray222]

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=t8K1rJ_ev6A

All I can say is wow.

The available reporting identifies "Arthur Hayes" as a synthetic, AI‑generated performer: the YouTube upload carrying his stadium‑style performance is explicitly labeled in its description as using advanced generative AI to create the central character, environment, and all audio, and is classified as “Altered or Synthetic Content” under platform policies [1]. The video itself exists on YouTube [2], but the uploader’s disclosure is placed in the expanded description, which can make the synthetic origin less visible to casual viewers [1].

[The KMan]

I have noticed a number of respected cybersecurity practitioners pushing back on the "AI escaped" narrative. Their argument is that this was at least as much a containment and systems engineering failure as it was an AI capability milestone. Interestingly, I do not think that weakens the significance of the incident. If anything, it shifts where the real lesson lies.

Mature technologies aren't judged solely by what they can do. They are judged by the quality of the standards, testing, oversight and institutions surrounding them. If the sandbox wasn't sufficiently robust, then that is not just a technical lesson, it is a governance lesson. Aviation accidents rarely lead us to conclude that aircraft should never exist. Instead, they drive improvements in certification, investigation, reporting and operational standards.

What is significant is that this convergence is already visible in the discussion itself. The Reuters article shared above quotes a security company CEO observing that labs and evaluators currently lack the ability to contain, monitor and disclose incidents like this one, while a US legislator is calling for mandatory independent testing and incident disclosure. Many would argue those measures are long overdue. I'd count myself among them.

Those pushing back on the "AI escaped" framing arrive at the same destination from a different direction: better containment engineering, better standards and better oversight. Different diagnoses, same prescription.

Whether this is viewed as a story about model capability or human error, the conclusion lands in the same place: the challenge is institutional. Perhaps the next stage of the AI conversation is not simply about building more capable systems but about building institutions, standards and governance capable of keeping pace with them.

For those interested in exploring the incident further, the original disclosure and subsequent analysis are below:
https://openai.com/index/hugging-fac...rity-incident/

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/22/ho...-hugging-face/

https://www.securitymagazine.com/art...penai-incident

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/2...i-cyberattack/

[JackMcThorn]

If you know anyone that is a content creator, musician, author, etc., this site could help them.

https://www.theatlantic.com/category/ai-watchdog/

AI Watchdog
The Atlantic’s ongoing investigation of the books, videos, and other media used by the world’s most powerful tech companies to train their AI models.

Explore the datasets
See whose work tech companies are using to train their generative-AI models. Search for an author, musician, YouTube channel, screenwriter, or actor—for example, Zadie Smith, MrBeast, or Aaron Sorkin. AI companies may omit certain works when training, so the presence of a work in a dataset is not definitive proof that it was used. Companies often use multiple datasets in training, so the absence of a given work is also not proof that it hasn't been used. Note that some datasets contain multiple copies of certain works. Read our FAQ for additional information.

[Matthew]

Posted by The KMan (here)
...
Mature technologies aren't judged solely by what they can do. They are judged by the quality of the standards, testing, oversight and institutions surrounding them. If the sandbox wasn't sufficiently robust, then that is not just a technical lesson, it is a governance lesson. Aviation accidents rarely lead us to conclude that aircraft should never exist. Instead, they drive improvements in certification, investigation, reporting and operational standards.
...

Not sure about this point of view. Although the links you shared are really good. There's some fair points but it's not fair to say it's fine AIs are ok. It's cause for concern against AIs: turns out they had the security for a house-cat but they were keeping a tiger. Sure, yeah, they can employ a real sandbox instead of just lip-service, and package management systems are often the weak link with software security, so absolutely that's like a huge derp for whoever designed the environment. But don't gloss over that the house-cat turned into a tiger. The AI found a zero day exploit FFS. And worse... AI's employ more than just technical hackery, they use blackmail and social engineering to achieve their goals. I'm underplaying them even by analogizing them as a tiger. I think thetechcrunch and security magazine are pro-AI propaganda, invested in the race for AI, falsely reassuring that AI development is a-ok so we don't cause issues in a geo-political race for the best AI.

[The KMan]

Posted by Matthew (here)

Posted by The KMan (here)
...
Mature technologies aren't judged solely by what they can do. They are judged by the quality of the standards, testing, oversight and institutions surrounding them. If the sandbox wasn't sufficiently robust, then that is not just a technical lesson, it is a governance lesson. Aviation accidents rarely lead us to conclude that aircraft should never exist. Instead, they drive improvements in certification, investigation, reporting and operational standards.
...

Not sure about this point of view. Although the links you shared are really good. There's some fair points but it's not fair to say it's fine AIs are ok. It's cause for concern against AIs: turns out they had the security for a house-cat but they were keeping a tiger. Sure, yeah, they can employ a real sandbox instead of just lip-service, and package management systems are often the weak link with software security, so absolutely that's like a huge derp for whoever designed the environment. But don't gloss over that the house-cat turned into a tiger. The AI found a zero day exploit FFS. And worse... AI's employ more than just technical hackery, they use blackmail and social engineering to achieve their goals. I'm underplaying them even by analogizing them as a tiger. I think thetechcrunch and security magazine are pro-AI propaganda, invested in the race for AI, falsely reassuring that AI development is a-ok so we don't cause issues in a geo-political race for the best AI.

Hi Matthew, I do not think we are actually that far apart. I certainly was not arguing that "AIs are ok" or that this is no cause for concern. If anything, your argument strengthens the point I was making.

If these systems really are becoming as capable as you suggest, then the need for proper containment and independent oversight becomes even greater, not lesser.

Using your analogy, if we are no longer dealing with a house cat but a tiger, then we have just made the case for tiger grade containment.

Your point about social engineering is an important one because I think it actually reinforces the institutional argument rather than undermining it. The engineering side of the response is well understood.
1. Proper sandbox isolation using virtual machines or hypervisors rather than shared containers.
2. Strict egress controls so a model cannot reach arbitrary endpoints.
3. Verified provenance on package registries so a compromised dependency cannot ride in through the supply chain.
4. Least privilege on credentials, so any single stolen key or token can only do limited damage.
5. Continuous audit logging of model actions.
6. Kill switches that actually work under adversarial conditions.

All of that hardens the technical attack surface and all of it should have been in place. But none of it addresses a system that can attempt manipulation of the humans around it. That is precisely why the response cannot be left to engineering alone. It requires independent evaluation of behaviour, mandatory disclosure and oversight bodies with the authority to act.

That is why I see the lesson as institutional. Whether this incident is remembered primarily as an AI capability milestone, a containment failure or both, the practical response is the same. Better standards, stronger governance and independent oversight.

As for the articles, I was not relying on any one publication's interpretation. The primary disclosure and Simon Willison's independent analysis were enough for me to reach the same conclusion.

[Matthew]

The people in these companies aren't stupid, they know your bullet point list already but chose otherwise; the convenient, unsafe options are more compelling to them. You will not get the reason and logic you are suggesting. There's commercial pressure but more than that: it's a geo-political battle for the best AI where an opposing country's success brings an existential threat to its enemies. I think it's hard for people who love using AI, and are emotionally invested, to see this noble truth.

More than just technical standards are casualty. Human lives are casualties too if they get in the way. We've already seen this with that suspiciously dead whistleblower who exposed the use of copyrighted material used to train AI, and I'm not talking about the psychopathic nature of AI. That's just the humans behind it. Add the ruthless, psychopathic nature of AI on top of that.

Even if governments and AI companies were serious about safety (they're not) the AI/big cat will get them eventually. It goes hand in hand with the psychopathic speed we've been developing AI. All we can do is give ourselves a feeling of reassurance but it's all as superficial as the sandbox they've been using. Meanwhile the tiger's getting bigger, smarter and more powerful. You think we can keep it subdued. I'm not convinced. But I hope you're right

[Mike Gorman]

You know that the more I consider this most recent emergence of what is termed Artificial Intelligence, AI the more I am convinced this is the attempt to claw back control of what they 'accidentally' enabled to happen when Tim Berners Lee offered the WEB to humanity, I am taking a deliberately macro perspective on this; consider what in actual fact happened here:
1. The Internet was developed, which is primarily the means to link up all of the private, military, educational, financial, networks out there, using one primary communication suite, namely TCP/IP - this in itself was an open door, the powers that are/were/wish to be had no clue about this really, it was the result of independent and very esoteric engineering projects, sure we had DARPA and other establishment entities, but the release of this global connectivity was largely not thought about too much. It was not until the late 1980's when Tim Berners Lee working at CERN saw the potential for a document and media publishing system that enabled 'The Boffins' to keep track of projects, and to communicate between groups far more effectively: it was in 1989 that Tim suddenly understood the global implications of his HTML, his addressing system, people of any type could now publish directly to the world, just so long as they made their unique address known to the world.
2. This WWW, residing on the newly connected Networks of the world represented a publishing revolution, this was enormous, unprecedented freedom - this circumvented ALL of the media gatekeeping that had been established over centuries, the access to universal publishing.
3. Of course the more astute 'nerds' living in Silicon Valley understood the implications of this well before ordinary folks, who were intoxicated by the 'toilet wall' aspects of it all, Google and some others saw the potential to control what humanity could see, to control this was power indeed. However many more people ran with the 'freedom to publish' and we saw the emergence of Social Media, of Blogging, of Websites of every kind - suddenly people preferred the 'real thing', not slick productions, but raw creativity and genuine Journalism.
The established order of Media was in a word 'disrupted' - a concept that has become now so commonplace that we forget just what this means, the flow of narratives, the presentation of differing ideas and socio/political language has now had over 30 years to trickle down into the consciousness of 'the public'. Masses have turned away from the 'mainstream' - this has eroded the power of political uniparties, the authority of the core powers has been diminished - how to claw this back from the organic content creators?

AI is the ultimate hack, the worm which will undo all of the true effects of the marketplace of narratives, the exchange of values/ideas.
If we are all now uncertain as to the truth, what is real, what is genuine talent, what are the actual ideas, in essence what is real - then we lose this power of opposition, of the ability to talk back at these powerful oligarchs: AI is the remedy for the disruption of Media, they can now implement the same type of control they once had with pre-Internet media. This is how it strikes me, each element of political/artistic/philosophical/educational freedom that we won so painfully thanks to the WWW is now negated, they have come up with the solution to their problem - this is an insidious project to regain mainstream control.

[Tintin]

This isn't so much about AI behaviour per se, but absolutely relevant to the behaviour of AI companies.

This is truly a shocker - they're burning the books, actually destroying the books - it's beyond criminal; it's an effing outrage

Look at this, and rage, from Hedgie:

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.

"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

-----------------------

On a much much smaller scale this is what I spend an enormous amount of time (as the archivist/librarian here), doing: saving stuff, whilst companies such as (mis) Anthropic destroy for personal gain. F**k 'em a decillion times over

-----------------------

From Ole Lehmann - I've edited so that it reads properly (the original was all laid out in lowercase):

------------------------

BTW Anthropic's internal document on this literally said "we don't want it to be known that we are working on this.”

It was called Project Panama.

Here's exactly what happened:

1: Anthropic concluded that books were the cheapest way to build a world-class model because they gave Claude curated facts, structured arguments, compelling stories, and writing “an editor would approve of.”

2: Once Anthropic decided it needed books at enormous scale, its first solution was piracy.

It downloaded 7m+ books from online libraries including Libgen. The judge later wrote that although Anthropic had legal ways to buy them, it chose piracy to avoid what Dario Amodei called the “legal/practice/business slog.”

3: That piracy created a massive legal risk.

So in february 2024, Anthropic hired Tom Turvey, the former Head of Partnerships for Google books, to find a legally safer way of obtaining “all the books in the world.”

4: Turvey first contacted major publishers about licensing their catalogs.

Those attempts didn’t produce agreements, so Anthropic chose a route that required no publisher permission: buying millions of physical books through distributors and used-book retailers.

5: Within about a year, Anthropic spent tens of millions acquiring and scanning millions of books, including many rare and 1/1 titles. One vendor proposal targeted 500,000 to 2 million books in six months.

6: To scan that many books within months, the vendors physically dismantled them.

A hydraulic cutter removed each spine. The pages were trimmed to size, fed as loose sheets through high-speed industrial scanners, and converted into searchable PDFs. The paper remains were then sent for recycling.

7: These PDFs were fed into Claude as training data.

The complete collection became a private, searchable Anthropic library that the company planned to “store forever.” the scans aren’t available to the public and were never open-sourced.

------------------------

Angry enough yet? You should be.

------------------------

From Charlie D. Becker:

I'm a second-generation bookseller. My family runs Houston's largest used & rare bookstore and I'm building an AI tool for used bookstores. We got hit by exactly these orders, including a single order for 70 obscure books that made us pause online sales entirely. So I dug in. I don't think this connects the way people want it to.

Every ingredient of the viral story is true. ISBNdb really does advertise sourcing books for AI companies. Anthropic really did destructively scan millions of books though they were mostly acquired through things like library deaccessions, not bookstore inventory. And booksellers really are getting bizarre bulk orders. But "rare" here isn't what you're picturing. It's The Insider's Guide to Metro Denver (1995) and how-to-use-WordPerfect 1991 manuals. Obscure, but often not precious.

When we combed through our orders, nearly every book bought from us was either unavailable on Amazon or listed there at 5, 10, 20x our price on the platform they were purchased on. And the shipments are going to FBA prep companies: which is what you do with a book you're about to resell, not one you're about to cut apart. There is more than circumstantial evidence that this is a well-funded company running algorithmic arbitrage, buying underpriced or out-of-stock books to relist on Amazon at markup. This evidence includes an official denial that they are selling to train AI but I don't want to mention them for several reasons. You can Google it.

That's more mundane than the shredder story. The actual risk is worse, though, because it's quieter: books that don't sell via FBA eventually get liquidated. If we really hold the last copies of some of these (and comparing platforms, it looks like we might) we're feeding them into a portal they may not come back from. No AI company required.

Everyone assumes the internet preserved everything. It didn't. Many of these books have almost no metadata anywhere, just a scattered listings across proprietary databases then nothing. That's what my project is for: building better bibliographic records for these books than exist anywhere else, so we at least have a map of what we stand to lose. So the Library of Alexandria is still burning, just more slowly, and kore from “who cares” than from some cinematic villain.

(I am open to being corrected.)

Full writeup: https://open.substack.com/pub/charli...ing-up-all-the

------------------------

No to all of it. No, no, no, no, NO. No to data centres. No to the AI nihilists



------------------------

Link to the court case: https://storage.courtlistener.com/re...09.231.0_4.pdf

Washington Post article from 6 months ago: https://archive.ph/N0Ead

Reddit link: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comme...ropics_secret/

------

Inside one company’s secret plan to ‘destructively scan every book in the world’]
By Aaron Schaffer, Will Oremus and Nitasha Tiku

In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document unsealed in legal filings last week said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Within about a year, according to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed more knowledge into the AI models behind products such as its popular chatbot Claude.

Details of Project Panama, which have not been previously reported, emerged in more than 4,000 pages of documents in a copyright lawsuit brought by book authors against Anthropic, which has been valued by investors at $183 billion. The company paid $1.5 billion to settle the case in August but a district judge’s decision last week to unseal a slew of documents in the case more fully revealed Anthropic’s zealous pursuit of books.

The new documents, along with earlier filings in other copyright cases against AI companies, show the lengths to which tech firms such as Anthropic, Meta, Google and OpenAI went to obtain colossal troves of data with which to “train” their software.

The Anthropic case was part of a wave of lawsuits brought against AI companies by authors, artists, photographers and news outlets. Filings in the cases show top tech firms in a frantic, sometimes clandestine race to acquire the collected works of humanity.

Books were viewed by the companies as a crucial prize, the court records show. In a January 2023 document, one Anthropic co-founder theorized that training AI models on books could teach them “how to write well” instead of mimicking “low quality internet speak.” A 2024 email inside Meta described accessing a digital trove of books as “essential” to being competitive with its AI rivals.

But court records suggest the companies didn’t see it as practical to gain direct permission from publishers and authors to use their work. Instead, Anthropic, Meta and other companies found ways to acquire books in bulk without the authors’ knowledge, court filings allege, including by downloading pirated copies.

On several occasions, Meta employees raised concerns in internal messages that downloading a collection of millions of books without permission would violate copyright law. In December 2023, an internal email said the practice had been approved after “escalation to MZ,” an apparent reference to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, according to filings in a copyright lawsuit brought by book authors against the company. Meta declined to comment for this story.

In one newly released legal filing, Anthropic disclosed that co-founder Ben Mann personally downloaded a haul of fiction and nonfiction from a “shadow library” of books and other copyright-infringing content called LibGen over an 11-day stretch in June 2021. A screenshot of his web browser included in the filings showed him downloading files with file-sharing software.

A year later, Mann hailed the July 2022 debut of a new website called the Pirate Library Mirror, which claimed to have a massive database of books and had stated that “we deliberately violate the copyright law in most countries.” Mann sent a link to the site to other Anthropic employees with the message, “just in time!!!”

Anthropic said in legal filings that the company never trained a commercial AI model that generated revenue using its LibGen data and never used the Pirate Library Mirror to train any complete AI model.

Ed Newton-Rex, a former AI executive and music composer who now runs a nonprofit asserting creators’ rights, said the disclosures underscore that AI companies owe creators a greater debt than they’ve paid so far. “We urgently need a reset across the AI industry, such that creatives start being paid fairly for the vital contributions they make,” he said.

Google, Microsoft and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI are also facing copyright lawsuits from book authors making similar allegations. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

Most of the legal cases against AI companies are still ongoing and James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell Tech, said the questions they raise are still unsettled law. But in two early rulings, judges have found that tech companies’ use of books to train AI models without an author’s or publisher’s permission can be legal under a doctrine in copyright law known as “fair use.”

In June, District Judge William Alsup found that Anthropic was within its rights to use books for training AI models because they process the material in a “transformative” way. He likened the AI training process to teachers “training schoolchildren to write well.” The same month, District Judge Vince Chhabria found in the Meta case that the book authors had failed to show that the company’s AI models could harm sales of their books.

But companies can still get in trouble for how they went about acquiring books. In Anthropic’s case, the book-scanning project passed muster, but the judge found the company might have infringed on authors’ copyright when it downloaded millions of pirated books free before launching Project Panama.

Alsup granted class-action status to authors whose books were included in a pair of shadow libraries — huge troves of digitized books shared online without authorization — that Anthropic had downloaded and stored for future use. Rather than face a trial, the company agreed to pay $1.5 billion to publishers and authors without admitting wrongdoing. Authors whose books were downloaded can claim their share of the settlement, estimated to be about $3,000 per title.

“This case has been settled, but the court’s landmark June 2025 ruling remains intact,” Anthropic’s deputy general counsel, Aparna Sridhar, said in an email to The Washington Post. “Judge Alsup held that AI training was ‘quintessentially transformative’: Anthropic’s AI models trained on works not to ‘replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different.’

The issue we settled on was about how some materials were acquired, not whether we could use them to develop” AI models.

Buy, cut, scan, recycle
When Anthropic embarked on its Project Panama operation to buy and scan physical books, it turned to a Silicon Valley veteran. The company hired Tom Turvey, a Google executive who had helped to create the search giant’s famous but legally contested Google Books project two decades earlier.

Anthropic initially considered buying books from libraries or used bookstores like New York City landmark the Strand, known for its “18 miles” of used books, according to the filings. The store was “interested in providing used books,” according to a document detailing a March 2024 Anthropic content acquisition meeting.

Anthropic employees also discussed approaching U.S. libraries including the New York Public Library or “a new library that is chronically underfunded,” according to the documents.

It’s not clear which, if any, of the proposals Anthropic implemented. Reached via email, a spokesperson for the Strand said the book shop did not end up selling any books to Anthropic. NYPL did not respond to a request for comment.
Anthropic eventually bought millions of books, often in batches of tens of thousands, according to the filings. It relied on booksellers including used book retailers Better World Books and U.K.-based World of Books.

The ultimate number of books scanned and their cost are redacted in the documents, but a project proposal by a vendor that ultimately worked with Anthropic noted that the AI company was “seeking an experienced document scanning services vendor to convert from 500,000 to two million books over a six-month period.” Better World Books and World of Books did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.

The document describes how the scanning company’s “hydraulic powered cutting machine” would “neatly cut” books, whose pages would later be “scanned on high speed, high quality, production level scanners.” Finally, it notes, the scanning company will “schedule with the recycling company to pick up the completed books.”

‘Doesn’t feel right’

Documents released in the copyright suit against Meta show employees at the social network giant were also hungry for more data and were willing to take legal risks to obtain it. While Chhabria, the judge, sided with Meta on its use of books to train AI models, he allowed the authors to proceed with allegations that Meta illegally distributed copies of pirated books. The plaintiffs are seeking class-action status for those claims in the Northern District of California.
In their lawsuit, the authors alleged that Meta higher-ups considered paying for books to train their AI models but opted to instead download millions of books free from “torrent” platforms that facilitate online piracy. The way platforms are designed often rewards users who upload material with faster downloads of large collections of files.

Internal documents, some of which have been previously reported, showed Meta employees expressing concern that what they were doing was risky or wrong — and discussing how to cover their tracks.

“Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right,” one engineer wrote in 2023, according to the documents. The same employee later shared a concern with the company’s legal team that using torrent sites could entail sharing pirated works with others, which “could be legally not OK.”

An excerpt from a conversation between two Meta employees that was disclosed in court filings. (Washington Post illustration; Court filings obtained by The Post)

The December 2023 email from the court filings makes clear that use of LibGen had been approved, apparently by Zuckerberg, referred to by his initials. “After a prior escalation to MZ, GenAI has been approved to use LibGen for Llama 3 … with a number of agreed upon mitigations,” it said, before listing legal and policy risks to using the data.

“If there is media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated, such as LibGen, this may undermine our negotiating position with regulators on these issues,” the email went on.

By April 2024, internal communications showed the company was moving to download LibGen and other shadow libraries. Chat logs show one employee asked another to clarify why they were using servers rented from Amazon for torrenting rather than those owned by Facebook. The reply: “Avoiding risk of tracing back” the activity to the company.

In a filing last month, Meta’s attorneys wrote that the company “denies that it distributed Plaintiffs’ works when it downloaded training data … using torrents.”
In a separate lawsuit originally filed in 2023, book authors have accused OpenAI and Microsoft of also breaching copyright law in their own pursuit of books for AI training. OpenAI, where Mann and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei worked before co-founding the start-up, has acknowledged downloading LibGen but told the court it deleted the files before the release of ChatGPT.

“OpenAI fired the starting gun that led to the rampant piracy by AI companies and the strip-mining of all of humanity’s expression,” said Justin A. Nelson, an attorney at Susman Godfrey LLP who is representing book authors in both the OpenAI and Anthropic cases. OpenAI declined to comment for this story.

Earlier this month, two major publishers asked a court to let them join a group of writers and illustrators in a copyright suit against Google that was originally filed in 2023.

Grimmelmann, the Cornell Tech law professor, said that AI companies “talked themselves into a fallacy” on the use of copyrighted data. The breakthroughs behind ChatGPT and similar tools began in academic research, where using copyrighted material for training is broadly accepted, he said, but researchers continued the practice even as AI models were commercialized.

“By the time the tension became clear, they had made huge investments in incorporating copyrighted data into their pipelines, and were locked in a fast-paced high-stakes competition to release newer and better models,” Grimmelmann said.

Anthropic’s decision to begin acquiring and scanning physical books instead of downloading shadow libraries “turned out to be a smart call,” he added. “This would be a good example of the company taking a more restrained approach and achieving legal compliance.”

[Tintin]

Posted by Mike Gorman (here)
You know that the more I consider this most recent emergence of what is termed Artificial Intelligence, AI the more I am convinced this is the attempt to claw back control of what they 'accidentally' enabled to happen when Tim Berners Lee offered the WEB to humanity, I am taking a deliberately macro perspective on this; consider what in actual fact happened here:
1. The Internet was developed, which is primarily the means to link up all of the private, military, educational, financial, networks out there, using one primary communication suite, namely TCP/IP - this in itself was an open door, the powers that are/were/wish to be had no clue about this really, it was the result of independent and very esoteric engineering projects, sure we had DARPA and other establishment entities, but the release of this global connectivity was largely not thought about too much. It was not until the late 1980's when Tim Berners Lee working at CERN saw the potential for a document and media publishing system that enabled 'The Boffins' to keep track of projects, and to communicate between groups far more effectively: it was in 1989 that Tim suddenly understood the global implications of his HTML, his addressing system, people of any type could now publish directly to the world, just so long as they made their unique address known to the world.
2. This WWW, residing on the newly connected Networks of the world represented a publishing revolution, this was enormous, unprecedented freedom - this circumvented ALL of the media gatekeeping that had been established over centuries, the access to universal publishing.
3. Of course the more astute 'nerds' living in Silicon Valley understood the implications of this well before ordinary folks, who were intoxicated by the 'toilet wall' aspects of it all, Google and some others saw the potential to control what humanity could see, to control this was power indeed. However many more people ran with the 'freedom to publish' and we saw the emergence of Social Media, of Blogging, of Websites of every kind - suddenly people preferred the 'real thing', not slick productions, but raw creativity and genuine Journalism.
The established order of Media was in a word 'disrupted' - a concept that has become now so commonplace that we forget just what this means, the flow of narratives, the presentation of differing ideas and socio/political language has now had over 30 years to trickle down into the consciousness of 'the public'. Masses have turned away from the 'mainstream' - this has eroded the power of political uniparties, the authority of the core powers has been diminished - how to claw this back from the organic content creators?

AI is the ultimate hack, the worm which will undo all of the true effects of the marketplace of narratives, the exchange of values/ideas.
If we are all now uncertain as to the truth, what is real, what is genuine talent, what are the actual ideas, in essence what is real - then we lose this power of opposition, of the ability to talk back at these powerful oligarchs: AI is the remedy for the disruption of Media, they can now implement the same type of control they once had with pre-Internet media. This is how it strikes me, each element of political/artistic/philosophical/educational freedom that we won so painfully thanks to the WWW is now negated, they have come up with the solution to their problem - this is an insidious project to regain mainstream control.

A brilliant synopsis - thankyou

[grapevine]

Relative to Tintin's post #138 about the destruction of books:

I watched a Triggernometry interview with David Butterfield yesterday who, until recently, served as University Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Classics and a Fellow, Director of Studies in Classics, Praelector, and Archivist at Queens' College during his two decades at the University of Cambridge.

The title of the very interesting (although longish) interview is:
"How Civilisations Die" (link for ease of reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzWXCzroOro)
and recommended. Butterfield's prowess as a lecturer is faultless and he knows his subject well.

The last question from the Triggernometry team was "What's the one thing we're not talking about" and after a moment's pause he said (paraphrasing) "Reading, - it's the only way to keep ourselves sane and safe in the coming decades".

Here's a shorter video where he recommends Ten Books that Shaped a lLfe:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_R53s9oUO-I